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.