In this centenary year of Kantor's birth (and a quarter-century since his death), the engagement with the afterlife of his theatre could hardly be more different than in the example of these two books. Indeed, the disparity in the ways that each conceives of the relation between its subject and addressee, the sources and destinations of the analyses offered, could itself be a topic for theatre research, especially as this relation is meant to model, in each case, the transmission between history and performance, or production and reception. Romanska's monograph offers an impassioned, personal polemic, whereas Fazan, Burzynska and Brys offer a collection of conference papers, presenting a polyvocal compendium celebrating the potential for dialogue among distinct perspectives. This difference (whether in consequence or in origin) is perhaps most conspicuous with respect to the question of translation in each book, which itself testifies to the passes and impasses of the intercultural reception of the theatre they discuss. (Here one must also gratefully acknowledge the considerable work of Anda MacBride in making the breadth of essays in Fazan, Burzynska and Brys available to the anglophone reader.)

Romanska's declared aim is to rescue Grotowski's Akropolis and Kantor's The Dead Class from English-language readings that cannot assess these works’ engagements with a specifically Polish literary and historical heritage, a critique that she extends to a perceived precedence of performance over literary theatre in addressing what she calls ‘a formalist operation in de-contextualisation’ (p. 6). Not the least interest of her book, then, is in allowing the anglophone reader access to discussion of (although rarely between) a variety of sources concerning each production that are otherwise currently only available in Polish. Whilst these materials undoubtedly enrich our understanding, their framing consciously relativizes both artists’ challenge to literary reading as a condition for theatrical reception. Indeed, Romanska's wider claims, especially with respect to Jerzy Grotowski's impact on Schechner, for instance, in constituting ‘the premise of performance studies’ (p. 78), could be seen as raising problems of their own. The polemical reduction of this ‘premise’ to the very terms that have, indeed, been the critical object of such ‘studies’ occludes the possibility that this is not simply a matter of ‘absolute ignorance’ (p. 79) concerning sources, but rather an expansion in the historical possibilities of reception. (Such cross-cultural possibilities – whose displacements through the experience of exile are famously a feature of Polish Romantic and modernist cultural heritage – could themselves be further explored with respect to other analyses of modern imaginaries by, for example, Arjun Appadurai.) Despite Romanska's claims (p. 9), the discussion of Kantor here – as itself an example of engagement with cultural translation – complements, rather than supersedes, the primary materials (and their contextualization) offered by Michal Kobialka and Krzysztof Miklaszewski. After all, this field of research should be understood to include, rather than exclude, the possibilities of debate about these materials, possibilities that are always open to being delineated anew rather than being supposed to have been already defined.

Not simply memorializing the past but ‘revitalising’ it (p. 13), Fazan, Burzynska and Brys offer comparative (rather than hagiographic) reflections on Kantor's legacy from various cultural perspectives – indeed, avowedly ‘trespassing’ (p. 14) on Kantor's own sense of prerogative concerning the transmission of his work. Organized in five thematic groupings, this treasury of essays gives ‘memories as well as … new and original reflections’ (p. 11), from those whose insights are based on having directly participated in the making of the productions (as members of the Cricot 2 ‘family’, such as Andrzej Welminski and Miklaszewski), to comparisons drawn with other artists, such as Beuys, Grzegorzewski, Schlingensief, and even Grotowski, by both established and ‘emerging’ theorists and historians. Importantly, this collection addresses the full range of Kantor's artistic work, without reducing any one aspect to an analysis through another. Although to single out particular essays would be to distort the value of this kaleidoscopic collection, the essay by Anna Halczak – a former director of the Cricoteka, to whose memory the book is dedicated – may itself be read as part of the history of ‘transmission’ that aims to address what, for Kantor, ‘is at stake’ within it (p. 304). Here a vital question is raised concerning Kantor's own claims for the aesthetic autonomy of his archive, as itself a potential ‘memory theatre’, which poses a challenge to modes of forgetting that may inform both curatorial and academic study.