Dead Class was not just Kantor's breakthrough, but unequivocally one of the most transformative theatrical events of the late 1970s, one of only a few theatrical pieces that captured the spirit of the century. Peter Brook famously said: “Dead Class was a great shock for me. This play contains the suffering of all of Europe. I think that theatre is nothing more than an attempt to condense everything in existence. Dead Class was just that: the experience of humanity condensed in one image.” Writing about Wielopole, Wielopole three years after the New York premiere of Dead Class, Margaret Croyden summarizes Kantor's impact on the international theatre scene:

Despite the impact of Dead Class on the contemporary avant-garde (from Richard Foreman to Robert Wilson to Krystian Lupa), there's a surprising lack of in-depth scholarship about this work. The universal Kantor appealed to twentieth-century universal tastes and anxieties, but the Polish Kantor, like one of his vagabond artists, carried with him the entire baggage of national trauma and psychosis, the “hollow and sneering” laughter of his generation's ghosts.