Using different forms of storytelling to communicate the past has always been a way for communities to educate and entertain themselves, to guide their future and remember their past behaviour – a means of maintaining and reinventing cultural heritage and of producing, perpetuating, and challenging cultural norms. Theatre, as Marvin Carlson suggests in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, is particularly well-suited to this multi-layered communicative task, since its content is reinforced and augmented by its form and modes of expression. Taking Marvin Carlson’s vision of the theatre’s close relation to memory as a point of departure, the Introduction raises some key questions about memory in relation to theatre and performance that will guide our investigation in the subsequent chapters: Why does memory hold such a privileged place in contemporary experience? How has it become such an important political tool in response to the challenges of modernity? And how can the discipline of theatre studies define and deploy this term, theoretically and in practice? These are some of the questions engaged in the present volume of Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory, which is itself organized into three sections
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