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Mnemonic, National Theatre Review Complicité's Extraordinary '90s Play Is Resurrected For A New Generation

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32 views1 page

Mnemonic, National Theatre Review Complicité's Extraordinary '90s Play Is Resurrected For A New Generation

monolog

Uploaded by

emilie
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Time Out London

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told NOT to go to King’s…

Theatre, Experimental

National Theatre, South Bank

26 Jul--10 Aug 2024

Recommended

Review

Mnemonic

Revived and revised, Complicité’s


extraordinary 1999 play is like staring
at the secrets of universe

Tuesday 2 July 2024

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Written by Andrzej Lukowski

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Time Out says

Simon McBurney’s legendary theatre


company Complicité basically has two
modes: clever but fairly narratively
conventional takes on difficult-to-stage
classics, and brain melting experimental
odysseys that’ll rewire your cerebellum.

Their 1999 play ‘Mnemonic’ -


reimagined and redevised for 2024 - is
very much in the latter camp, although
to a certain extent the problem with
brain melting experimental odysseys is
that they can be hard to describe in a
way that accurately conveys their appeal.

Does a play that explores the parallels


between the act of memory, the act of
migration, the act of ancestry and the
act of storytelling sound intrinsically
thrilling to you? It doesn’t to me. But it
truly is.

‘Mnemonic’ begins slow, with actor


Khalid Abdalla delivering a rambling,
slightly Richard Curtis-y speech about
the nature of memory, his personal
background as a Brit born in Scotland
with Egyptian ancestry, and the fact that
Compicité is reviving its 25-year-old hit
‘Mnemonic’, with Khalid assuming the
role director McBurney originally played.

Eventually it unfurls into two separate


strands: the mystery of what happened
to Alice (Eileen Walsh), the wife of Omar
(Khalid), who abruptly disappeared nine
months ago after her mother’s funeral;
and a fictionalised version of the true-life
mystery of a body discovered on the
border of the Austrian and Italian Alps in
1991 due to a freak glacier melt, which
was discovered to everyone’s great
surprise to have been 5,200 years old.

It’s essentially two mystery stories,


staged side by side and then,
audaciously, intertwined. One follows
Alice on an odyssey through Europe as
she haphazardly tries to track down the
father she never knew, desperate to find
a narrative to her existence now her
mum has gone. The other concerns the
‘iceman’ - his discovery, recovery and
the scrabble for the international
scientific community to impose a
narrative on his life. In the middle is
Omar, who watches shows about the
iceman late into the night while trying to
understand what became of Alice, and
starts to see strange links between the
two.

And this is the key to ‘Mnemonic’ - it is a


play about how everything is
interconnected, how the winds of
migration and the freak Saharan winds
that thawed the glacier are in their own
way the same idea from a human
perspective, how humanity is ultimately
defined by its need to see the world
through stories and how our reality is
fundamentally a patchwork of
unknowable things that fire up our
neurons. Which possibly sounds dry, but
at its graceful peak ‘Mnemonic’ is like
coming tantalising close to the meaning
of existence, like pulling back some veil
that our minds aren’t really yet meant to
comprehend.

Again, it could be dry but it isn’t. The


company-devised text has not been
made aggressively contemporary but at
the same time it has been reimagined
almost root and branch for a different
cast, and a world of Brexit, smartphones
and the Russian invasion of Ukraine
(maybe Omar’s obsession with the
iceman feels a little more esoteric in
2024 than in 1999, but there have been
research developments since then). The
Alice strand glows with humanity, the
sudden, strange connections she meets
with people as she travels through the
European night. The iceman thread is a
little more thesis-like, but it’s beautifully
handled, especially the late comic relief
of the scene where a panel of experts
each confidently say who they thought
he was, each with a different, essentially
unprovable opinion.

And it absolutely wouldn’t work without


an extraordinary creative team: it’s hard
to pick out an MVP, but the dreamy
movement – which deftly interweaves
the story’s strands and builds to a jaw
dropping final scene – Christopher
Shutt’s deft, gracious, sound design and
Michael Levine’s gauzy sets picked out
by Paul Anderson’s silhouetting lightning
design is the mark of creatives at the
absolute top of their field.

It starts slow, with the jocular lecture at


the start maybe even a smidge irritating,
but it builds into something luminous
and huge and almost beyond
comprehension. Its last few minutes feel
like staring overwhelmed at the secrets
of creation.

Details
Details

Address
National Theatre
South Bank
London
SE1 9PX

Transport:
Rail/Tube: Waterloo

Price:
£20-£89. Runs 2hr

Website

Dates
Dates and
and times
times

Fri, 26 Jul 2024

National 19:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Sat, 27 Jul 2024

National 14:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

National 19:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Mon, 29 Jul 2024

National 19:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Tue, 30 Jul 2024

National 19:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Wed, 31 Jul 2024

National 14:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

National 19:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Thu, 1 Aug 2024

National 18:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Fri, 2 Aug 2024

National 19:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Sat, 3 Aug 2024

National 19:30 £20-£89


Theatre Runs 2hr

Show more

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