Jan Kott wrote for the first issue of NTQ, and has been one of our advisory editors since the beginnings of the original Theatre Quarterly, to which he was also a regular contributor. As a much-published critic – his most recent book being The Bottom Translation, from Northwestern University Press in 1987 – he needs no introduction, and, ever since the first publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, his sense of how criticism can be made relevant to theatre practice has also meant that he is much in demand as that mysterious creature, the dramaturg. Now read on.…