Michal Kobialka, perhaps Tadeusz Kantor's most prolific English-language critic, opens his latest book with a broken promise. After his major publications on Kantor's theatre – A Journey through Other Spaces (1993) and ‘Forget Kantor’ (1994) – Kobialka repudiates the forgetting of his latter title with an explanation: ‘In this age of global wars and globalization by liberal capitalism, it is necessary to revitalize the debate on the nature of political theatre’ (p. viii). What follows is a compelling, if also at times overwhelming, collection of Kantor's theoretical writings, collected, translated and framed by Kobialka's own critical essays, many of which focus on the efficacy of political, avant-garde theatre. Beginning with Kantor's late-career retrospective essay ‘My Work – My Journey’ (1988), Kobialka returns to Kantor's origins and presents his writing more or less chronologically, organizing the book into five thematic sections: ‘Topography of Representation’, ‘Spatial Historiography: The Dead Class’, ‘Theatre of Similitude’, ‘Spatial Historiography: Silent Night’ and ‘The Space of Khora’.

For the reader already familiar with Kantor's theatre, Kobialka's book is a richly detailed chronicle of Kantor's thinking. One can trace the evolution of his theories from the Cricot 2 Theatre and Emballage to his Happenings and later ruminations on l'object prêt, most compellingly conveyed in his final performances structured around his own home and room. The original writings (some of which are newly translated by Kobialka) include Kantor's impressionistic essays, production notes and other ruminations as a wide-ranging and personal account of his productions. Due to the highly personal nature of these writings, Kobialka's critical essays provide an essential frame as he both defines the terminology and situates Kantor's aims within a larger scope of late twentieth-century French critical theory, most notably the historiography of Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and de Certeau. Although Kobialka includes several major productions and his critical essays, his analysis centres on the meanings that underlie and inform the stage images, which may leave an unfamiliar reader potentially puzzled as to the images on stage. The dark black-and-white images do little to ameliorate this and images of Kantor's vibrant paintings and sketches, so critical to his theatrical vision, are all too few.

What Kobialka does convey is the significance of Kantor's ambition to propel the avant-garde beyond its modernist politics, as familiarly rehearsed in the work of Piscator, Brecht and Boal. He effectively communicates Kantor's lifelong commitment to integrate his material political reality within his theatrical and performance aesthetics. The juxtaposition of Kantor's personal writing and Kobialka's astute theoretical framing assures that if there is nothing further on, there is still much to be gleaned from what is behind.