"He was afraid that people would destroy each other, that peace was only temporary"
I don’t remember how long I hesitated to open that door. Kantor had a reputation of having a furious character, so I waited and waited, I think I had a coffee first, in a bar at Sienna Street, and finally I opened that door, I went through the hall and I opened the second door, the door at my right hand, the door of the Cricoteka. There he was: sitting at his small table, black suit, white shirt, hat on his head, drinking coffee out of a glass, and above him the portrait of Witkiewicz.
He said: "good afternoon, how do you do, please sit down".
These words changed my life.
I talked with him, studied his work, translated his texts, saw his spectacles, spent hours and hours in the Cricoteka to watch his older spectacles, I published a book about him (still the only one in my language, i.e. Dutch), I made my phd on his work and I became a writer. Kantor was and is always with me.
He had his pleasant and his unpleasant moments: we all know. I remember him walking in the snow, saying: "O, I hate snow!" I remember him sitting in the basement of Cricoteka during the first rehearsal of I shall never return, shouting that he needed a table, and I helped one of the actors to get a new, large table, and when we came into the basement with that table, Kantor stood up, grasped the table out of our hands and threw it through the basement. I remember him in Milano, where he asked me to show him the video recordings that I had made during the rehearsals, on a Sunday morning, and I tried to connect my videorecorder to his television, but I didn’t succeed, and we were crawling both, on our knees, around the television, looking for a solution.
I remember a colloquium in Antwerp, where he was about to read his new manifesto. That was a sacred moment. He stood in front of the audience, he looked at the audience with passion, irony and pride, and also with anger. And he read his manifesto, which I later translated. When I read it now, it is still up to date and current, maybe even more. He warned for mass communication, mass consumption, mass media, almighty technology, almighty power, he was afraid that people would destroy each other, that peace was only temporary et cetera. Precisely! He lived under a communistic dictatorship (he liked to push his head against allmighty power) and he knew what it meant to be not free, and at the same time he saw how the capitalistic society (which would embrace his country in the same year of his death) was ready to install a new kind of dictatorship, completely different and extremely dangerous. We all know, today, what this means: we live in a society in which everything is commercialized and merchandised, in which technology is the new god and in which the Big Brother mentality (for which George Orwell warned already in 1948) is completely realised. Wars are not over. The individual is still the puppet in the hands of the power. Money rules everything. The catastroph is never far away.
Kantor knew it. He warned us. In his manifesto, and also in his theatre: I think of the last scene in I shall never return, when everything is covered with black.