Remembering is not a neutral function but an imaginative act, Khalid Abdalla tells us in a lecture-style preamble. He might be speaking about the nature of this revival itself.
Originally conceived by Simon McBurney in 1999 and revered as one of Complicité theatre company’s greatest hits, Mnemonic is not replicated but reimagined by an 11-strong company of actors. McBurney again directs, this time with Abdalla as the lead, charismatic and hitting all the beats of his many parts. These include a charmingly scattered “memory DJ”; a bereft man whose partner, Alice (Eileen Walsh, excellent as always), goes missing while searching for her father; and a corpse discovered under ice which, it turns out, has been preserved for more than 5,000 years.
References to Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine and the original 1999 show remind us this is not the neutral excavation of theatrical memory but an active, updated act of imagination.
It starts out small and discursive but blooms into scale in typical Complicité style. There is a chair (watch what magic happens with that) and a spotlight under which Abdalla stands to tell us about the function of the hippocampus, the ways in which pasts and futures are connected, and the synaptic connectivity of memory.
Much of what follows gets your synapses fizzing: disappearances collide and create parallels. Real and recorded voices are overlaid so a present moment in time carries notes from the past. An audience participation activity feels briefly like an imaginative meditation into our own pasts.
Moments of satire leaven the play’s exploration of origins, and range from a fabulous panel talk between European experts who discuss the prehistoric iceman (which you wish would become its own play), to a joke among minor characters who are all migrants living in London’s suburbs.
Arresting visual effects give the impression of an odyssey unwinding before our eyes. Michael Levine’s set turns a speeding train into bars, bedrooms and the Tirolean ridge from which the iceman is chiselled free. There is good work from video designer Roland Horvath (for rocafilm) too in creating kinetic effects across the stage.
As a play of ideas, Mnemonic is whimsical and diffuse. It is as if, with all these exquisite parts, the production does not quite deliver on a promise of profundity in tying them together. In one image, where the iceman becomes us, and we him, there is a lovely visual circularity that speaks to the question of origins, but it is more original as a theatrical image than an idea.
Alice’s story takes a sudden lurch away from the quest that has motivated her and dovetails with the iceman story metaphorically. It is a convenient rather than convincing outcome to prove the point Abdalla highlighted: that memory is creative, that we can never know where we came from, that we are all connected. The reflections on origins, identity and migration themselves seem very current though, and the wit, when it comes, is well timed and entertaining.
McBurney, in a 2010 interview with the Guardian, said the company was set up in order to “make theatre I couldn’t see”. Perhaps it is as a result of its own success that the show does not feel as much of a revolution of ideas and stagecraft as it did in 1999. It marks not only what Complicité did 25 years ago, but what they have done since: weaving together well-crafted meta-theatre with big philosophical questions and what seems like an overarching concern for humanity.
• At the Olivier theatre, National Theatre, London, until 10 August
