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PHILTHER AS A HISTORIOGRAPHIC MODEL At the end of his book devoted to theatre historiography, first published in 2009, Ihomas Postlewait makes it clear that "history happens and re-happens, as we continue to reconstitute the past each time we comprehend it. We are always rewriting and rereading history." The fact that this realization has become a commonplace by now, is the result of the development of theatre theory and its impact on writing theatre history since the 1980s. However, the “boom” in theatre theory, becoming far-reaching in the 1980s and 1990s, had little impact on theatre history for some time, since comprehensive historical surveys mostly remained theoretically “untouched”. The relationship between the two aspects of theatre studies was still problematic: theatre history, which had dominated for centuries, and theatre theory, which aimed at omnipotence at the end of the last century, formed almost two separate disciplines. Theatre historians did not seem to have been influenced by any theories (except positivism, of course), and theoreticians were not really interested in historicity, while using a larger and larger slice of contemporary performance (and even performance culture) as examples. Theatre history was exclusively under the spell of expanding our knowledge of the past, and theatre theory became increasingly lost in the extravagant application of cultural studies. They were far apart, but were interested in “reviewing everything, rewriting everything, restoring everything, face-lifting everything” with similar zeal, to produce a more complete/perfect report on their subjects in a way that showed the symptoms of paranoia. The one was striving to raise the number of our memories of history, and the other to expand the scope of theatre-like phenomena and/or performance. However, historical and theoretical research cannot be done separately, since the validity of our theoretical assumptions is granted by historical examinations, and the results of historical analysis (the answers we receive) cannot be achieved without continuous theoretical reflection and without questions that can only be formulated in this way. Examining changes in the paradigm of theatre studies since the 1970s, Patrice Pavis prophesied “the rehistoricization of research” for the period 1998-2008, which could resolve the epistemological futility of a great number of theoretical essays (and also essays masked to be theoretical) published in the 1990s. Looking back from 2021, Pavis’s prediction seems to be right. Researchers of history may have realized that the chances of the (obviously partial) relevance of theatre history could only come to the fore by the attempt to (re)arrange and not necessarily : Thomas Postlewait: The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 268. 5 Jean Baudrillard: The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, 12. ® Patrice Pavis: Theatre Studies and Interdisciplinarity, Theatre Research International 26:2 (2001), 155.
