Editorial: What Memory Wants

In her book In Memory of Memory, unearthing remains from archives to photograph albums and trinkets, piecing together the story of her family as it unfolds through the catastrophes of twentieth-century history, Russian poet Maria Stepanova writes, ‘This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.’1 In this issue of TRI, memory emerges as the keyword: be it echoing Derrida's hauntology, Carlson's theatre as a memory machine and ghosted site, or Roach's surrogation. Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux does not mention theatre in her autobiographical work The Years, where personal and collective memory of our time meet, but she does capture the inherent theatricality and performativity of memory when she writes, ‘memory was transmitted not only through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects’.3 Irene Vallejo's Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World is in many ways a book about historiographical memory where ghosts whisper sweetly into the reader's ear from the vast heterotopias of antiquity. Ghosts and Memory in Its First Season, Haifa, 2015–2016’ and in the closing piece, Ed Menta's ‘How the Teatro Olimpico and the Drottingholm Slottsteater “Perform” Their Pasts’. Whether evoking the kings and queens of the past as the empty chairs of Drottingholm do in Menta's article, or of forcibly displaced Palestinians in Yerushalmi's depiction of dual audience presence in Khashabi Theatre in