Theatre has often wondered if it is possible to reproduce history. Shakespeare, Schiller and Victor Hugo tried to achieve this purpose and, from another point of view, · on November the 7th 1920, six thousand actors commemorated the October Revolution. In Catalonia, the following plays represented recent landmarks of the review of history through theatre: Capmany and Romeu's Layret, Jordi Teixidor's Rebombori-2, Alfred Badia's Una croada, etc. Historical theatre is still able to exert the triple function that Shakespeare expected from it: its being productive, at the same time, from the economic, artistic and politic point of view. Lunatcharski, when explaining the reasons why he wrote his 86 Olivier Cromwell, asserted: «What interested me was —the question of the leader's psychology and, mainly, that of a revolutionary leader.» The third basic level of analysis of historical theatre is the one which causes most problems of, Iet us say, epistemological kind. Performing history on the stage means the possibility of making real the tunnel of time. The improvement of scenic technology also gives us the possibility of the deceit based on the illusion of the past: Belasco in The Girl of the Golden West spent three months in reproducing a «Californian» sunset. Historical cinema from Hollywood employed similar proceedings to the Romantics. Nontheless, theatre is not the reproduction of reality, but the creation of an unreal world useful to men's life. Brecht in Mother Courage does not deal with the Thirty Years War; he refers to one of the most serious problems which concerned his contemporaries. This does not mean at all that the playwright and bis collaborators neglect the historical strictness or the scientific knowledge of the past.
