Ironically, I’m having to review this Complicité production – back at the National Theatre for the first time since 2001, having debuted in London two years before that – from memory, as the press night for this show being oversubscribed meant I had to see this show at my own leisure and my expense, as opposed to being invited as a critic and having a notepad as a memory aid.
As such, and in keeping with the theme of memory, I’ve begun writing this article a day later, with the subsequent paragraph noting the moments I can recall after several hours have passed.
Lectures. A wooden chair. A rock. Audience participation. Nudity. Phone calls. Blurry curtains. Physicality. Magnificent LED screen upstage. Props. The ice man. Dramatic strings.
There’s a reason for listing the above. Khalid Abdalla, appearing first as himself, explains to us several ideas about memory from the outset – about its fragmentation and the creativity of recollection as one remembers a memory of a memory – and fragmented is a way of describing the show as a whole. The mock lecture, and audience participation which follows (arguably the more enlightening parts of this production), shift into Abdalla playing the character of Omar, and the story of a Neolithic iceman.
Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention (although I like to think I was, for the most part, thanks to Roland Horvath’s eye-catching and cinematic video design and the energetic choreography devised under McBurney’s direction), but I never clocked the connection or transitions between the two stories. It just appears to me to be an assortment of phone calls, lectures and reenactments – and it’s hard to see how this history lesson reverts back to the play’s opening info-dump on memory.
I’m mindful not to spoil the element of audience participation in Mnemonic, as it is profound and best left to explore in the moment, but I will say that it speaks to the broader notion that we’re all related due to the crossover in family trees through the generations. It also calls out our worsening attention spans and short-term memory, but not as much as it could have done.
I mean, we’re told to put our phones in pouches, for example, but the idea of social media being responsible for melting our minds isn’t touched upon at any point, despite this 2024 revival seeking to update the original material with more contemporary references to the coronavirus pandemic, Brexit and the war in Ukraine.
As with other Complicité works such as Can I Live? and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, there’s environmental commentary too – this time making the case that turbulence is nature’s reaction to human input, and this creates some kind of symbiotic relationship. How this relates to the frozen, naked and dead body of a Neolithic man, the subplot of Omar’s lover Alice trying to find her father and the concept of memory just isn’t clear.
It could well be that, per a comment at the very beginning around a sudden shock or emotion making us more likely to consign something to memory, the ‘shock’ of natural ‘turbulence’ based on human action is what’s shaping our memory, but that just seems far too tenuous a link.
And so ultimately, while it’s slick in presentation (there’s some gorgeous silhouette work from Paul Anderson too), the overwhelming magnitude in which all these ideas are clumped together for audiences to string together results in an narratively incongruous experience.
The more recent Complicité productions already mentioned in this review display a far more honed, protagonist-driven approach to the company’s mashup of education and entertainment. I can only imagine that’s why I found myself more struck and enthralled by Abdalla’s opening performance – with a proper protagonist and permissible audience hand-holding – than the story which follows, which doesn’t go far enough to centre one main character amid the pool of ideas.
Another ironic observation is that while a rock remains on stage throughout, we aren’t afforded a narrative ‘rock’ throughout this two-hour play.
This revised revival could have been more potent if it borrowed the learnings from prior shows, but instead, after being put on ice for 21 years (pun very much intended), Mnemonic is one of those shows which gets ahead of itself. Tragically, I fear that when audiences have to piece things together themselves – especially when they aren’t even afforded an interval to mull things over – they’re more inclined to give up and forget.
I certainly haven’t tried too hard to construe meaning from the show after watching it – not before committing to reading the playtext once this review is published. And even so, what an unfortunate position in which to find myself for a show named Mnemonic.
★★★
Mnemonic is now playing in the Olivier Theatre until 10 August.
The show will be captioned on 12 July and 3 August, British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted on 20 July, and audio described on 27 July, with a chilled performance on 8 August.
Production images: Johan Persson.
Liam O'Dell
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