Do you remember where you were this time last week, or where you celebrated New Year's Eve? These are the sort of questions that actor Khalid Abdalla throws out to the audience as we settle into our seats and he ambles centre stage in semi-lecture format, asking us to ponder on that slithering fish called memory.
To help us embody this journey, we are instructed to put on an eye mask and cast our minds back to a first pair of shoes, or perhaps clutching hands with parents in the schoolyard. Something about the blackout (if you embrace the eye mask) focuses the mind and does indeed take you back. But where is this going?
So far, so intriguing. “Each time you create a new memory, it is an act of imagination,” explains Abdalla to the bemused audience. And theatre company Complicité is no doubt the very incarnation of imaginative theatre, drawing memorable imagery out of physically driven narratives that burn bright for decades.
In a repertoire of so many inspired pieces, few shine as memorably as Mnemonic. Devised by Complicité in 1999, now, 25 years on from its opening, the theatrical masterpiece returns, tweaked, recreated and slightly reimagined. Experiencing the show as a young theatregoer overwhelmed by the scale of ideas and physicality all those years ago, I don't remember details, but I do remember the emotional sensations.
The lead role—played by McBurney in previous productions—is now taken by Khalid Abdalla, one of 11 members of a cast that also features three members of the original 1999 cast including Kostas Philippoglou, Richard Katz and Tim McMullan. There’s also the brilliant Eileen Walsh as Alice.
Through fluid physicality connecting abstract ideas before our brains have time to latch onto what is happening, the company carries us into a spider’s web of ideas that cling together to create an entire world for the audience to immerse in. There are also simple triggers—a leaf in a little cloth bag left on our seat—we are asked to trace its veins with our fingers to contemplate our heritage one minute and watch a dead body being chiseled out of a glacier the next. It is a play on our senses, and I want to savour each glorious, weighty yet fleeting nuance as, even with two hours and no interval, the performance flashes past way too quickly.
There are two main narratives strands that seem to be totally unrelated, yet become interwoven and spun into one great yarn. Part of the genius of this piece is the gathering of ideas, underpinned by devising as a collective, the heart of Complicité's creativity.
One story is of lovelorn Omar (Khalid) who is desperate to discover why his wife, Alice, abandoned him with no explanation (Eileen Walsh) after her mother’s funeral, realising that she needed to find her father. And the other, a fictionalised account of Otzi, the iceman, the body discovered on the border of the Austrian and Italian Alps in 1991 due to a glacier melt, which was revealed to have been 5,200 years old.
Abdalla, who moves effortlessly from narrator to lover and then corpse, is mesmerising to watch, and the stagecraft magic, close to witchcraft, still screams out of this newly revised piece as freshly as when it was first created.
There are also a few familiar signposts to emerge from an abstract space. A Eurostar journey backed by a train soundscape and red, yellow lights. Transforming a chair into a puppet iceman. Only Complicité could animate a wooden chair (a chair that belonged to McBurney’s grandfather) into an ancient figure that represents time and space. Apparently, the three puppeteers actually listen to each other’s breath in order to synchronise their movements. While Michael Levine's simple, yet memorably atmospheric device of the plastic curtain pulled across the length of the stage creates worlds within worlds. Figures appear and disappear through it as if receding into an ethereal zone.
Powerful visuals are attributed to the extraordinary creative team behind the piece. The movement is monumental, but so subtle, you barely notice. The cast flow together in one wave, clearly carving out storytelling through striking, physical imagery. Such ensemble work could only ever emerge from a deeply collaborative rehearsal space. Christopher Shutt's sensorial sound design and sets lit by Paul Anderson's atmospheric shadowy lighting design create motion and theatricality to the ever-moving action. A filmed version of Alice's face reflected on the stomach of a naked Abdalla is a touch of genius.
Remnants from the 1999 show are there—the naked frozen body and the pair of star-crossed lovers—but the dialogue feels totally different and renovated for the new cast and a new era of Brexit and climate change. There's more speech than I remember, and the stories that tumble out are intimately connected to the histories of the actors performing.
Most moving of all is this multiplicity of tongues that meet in London as the melting pot for the ancient and contemporary worlds, merging of past and present into a future map. There’s the Greek from “Cockfosters”, Egyptian tales of immigration as well as Irish and Jewish heritages. We understand that Alice’s father is Jewish with the discovery of a Tallis (prayer shawl) in her father’s suitcase, hailing from the troubled Lithuanian region as explained by a stranger on a train (Katz). You can picture the cast huddled in a studio space playing with ideas and building the piece with nothing more than yoga mats as props and vast pools of stories to share.
Unsettledness and climate change may dominate the text, but there’s also the question that drives the whole piece about shared origins and how essentially we are all related. Who are we and where do we come from? I will need to watch the piece again to mull over so many of the rich themes that Mnemonic throws out, but I hope not to wait another 25 years.