Revived after 25 years, this intensely humane and richly layered show from Simon McBurney’s Complicité asks us what it is to remember and to forget, and whether culture or chaos shapes our destiny.
It blends the story of a 5,200-year-old Neolithic man’s frozen corpse and that of a contemporary Irish London woman tracing her absent father’s journey across Europe. All to illustrate that migration, and the human or elemental violence that prompts it, are endlessly recurring facts of life. And that the stories we tell ourselves are necessary, but necessarily inaccurate.
It’s timely, thoughtful, sometimes challenging, but also witty enough to start with an in-joke that Complicité “used to be funny”. Back in 1999, McBurney directed, supervised the devising of and assumed centre stage in Mnemonic – a term for something that prompts a memory.
In this reimagined version Khalid Abdalla takes the lead, asking us in an explanatory preamble to put on eye masks, fondle a leaf, and imagine our pasts and our antecedents stretching back in time.
When the masks come off he’s become an audience member called Omar, who’s embarrassed by the woo-woo nonsense, then mortified when his phone goes off, but also frantic. Because the call might be from his lover Alice (Eileen Walsh) who has disappeared with their savings to search for the father she believed dead.
With the elegantly simple blend of design, music and physicality that distinguishes Complicité, scenes from the couple’s separate lives are elided with supporting histories (a Greek taxi driver, an Algerian hotel maid, a Jewish journalist) and the linking story of “Ötzi the Iceman”. Abdalla also plays the pitiful but fascinating cadaver, and is often naked as Omar, his body lit and presented in a way that’s more usually visited on the female form: sexualized, scrutinized, vulnerable, dead.
Ötzi was discovered in 1991 up a Tyrolean alp and became the subject of a nationalistic bidding war between Italy, Switzerland and Austria over who “owned” him. Later, we see bickering international academics (moderated by the urbanely authoritative Tim McMullan) argue whether he was a shaman or shepherd, a victim of a patriarchal challenge or a pogrom.
Stories that bolster our individual or cultural identity inevitably involve omissions and inventions. Memory plays tricks. For instance: I’d sanctified the original Mnemonic as one of my lifetime top ten stage productions. This time I found it hard to believe Alice’s quest, not least because the updating requires her to stumble through Russia’s war on Ukraine. Complicité’s theatrical vernacular has also become the norm now, rather than singular.
But Mnemonic is still a teeming, fecund representation of McBurney’s ability to make giant associative leaps while drilling down into what makes us human. It’s beautifully performed by both original and new cast members, and by an articulated chair that originally belonged to McBurney’s father. Or did it? That’s the point.
