How well Jan Kott understands that theatre is always our contemporary and must be shown to be our contemporary if it is not to become like old bones locked up in a glass case in a museum. He also explains with rare finesse that it is contemporary differently. Theatre lives in the here-and-now according to the culture making, interpreting, and appropriating it – and even reappropriating it, when it seems to have gone to belong somewhere else. Jan Kott knows, too, that reclaiming a culture means reclaiming a part of oneself. This tribute – part of research supported by the Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme – explores a kind of reappropriation in the work of an early, professed admirer of Kott, Peter Brook.