Jerzy Grotowski died on 14 January 1999. His influence, better to say his impact, upon experimental theatre practitioners is inestimable. When he first became known in the mid-1960s it was as the director of the Polish Theatre Laboratory, which already had gone through a few developmental phases (as had he). Those were the days when exceptional young directors were taken up as gurus, and Grotowski rose to the occasion, although he was careful to say, “I am not a one-man band.” He was more than a guru; his reception – outside Poland, anyhow – was messianic. His company, which I once described as seeming like a chamber music group in rippling Polish, had by then already achieved an astounding vocal and physical expressiveness. In their productions they stunned us with their originality, their intensity, their commitment, their austerity, the thoroughness of the actors’ work, the degree to which they seemed to have (at last!) found a technique to embody the Artaudian theatre some of us dreamed of realizing.