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INTRODUCTION undertaking, which was interested in restoring whole performances that already disappeared so that they would be present before our spiritual eyes with the vibrancy of “ein blutvolles Gesamtbild” or “ein unmittelbares Abbild”.! Although the Web makes it possible, Philther does not intend to simulate some kind of liveness (deconstructed by Philip Auslander in his seminal book),"! also aimed at, for example, by the virtual reconstruction of the 1526 Battle of Mohács as a 20-minute film created through the marriage of historical research and computer animation at Károli Gáspár University with the engine of the Total War series of games.!? Thirdly, Philther does not share Hermann’s perhaps most ambitious goal: the influence of theatrical practice by confronting today’s audience with a reconstructed performance.” Recent examples of this attempt, such as the “original practices” productions at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London or Le bourgeois gentilhomme, directed by Benjamin Lazar in Paris in 2004, show the contradiction that Jan Assmann pointed out in relation to music in the context of “werkgetreue Rezeption”. Namely, that a work can be performed in the spirit of the ideal of fidelity, reviving its (supposedly) original way of performance, but it cannot be received or experienced in the spirit of this ideal, i.e. “faithfully”. Since reception cannot be reconstructed, the relevance of this endeavor gets highly problematic from the point of view of contemporary theatre practice. Therefore, Philther prefers influencing the practice of understanding theatre. The way in which its historical analyses read theatre intends to serve as a model for the approach to productions of the present and the recent past. Fourthly, Philther does not cumulate documents treated as facts, but provides interpretation instead, putting textual and visual memories in context and evaluating them according to their reliability. It is not simply a matter of assessing certain documents as reliable or unreliable, but rather a matter of analyzing selection and interpretation themselves. It is a matter of examining what memories we are left with focus attention to (i.e. what is recorded in them and why) and what conception of theatre is revealed in them. Compared to the positivist form of reconstruction, this is the most important difference: the reflection of the memories of a past production, in terms of the expectations and the (not necessarily adverse) prejudices and values carried in their medium, which are considered far from neutral. Max Hermann: Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Berlin, Weidmann, 1914, 7. Philip Auslander: Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London — New York, Routledge, 1999. » Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3KiCZDq_C4 (accessed 6 February 2021). Cf. Hermann: Forschungen, 13. Cf. Jan Assmann: Die Zauberflöte. Oper und Mysterium, München-Wien, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005, 12. «12-6
