This is not quite what I remembered. Going into Simon McBurney’s Mnemonic I had in mind a cascade of images from its first staging 25 years ago: I recalled it as a show that, though dextrously physical, was trying to embody an abstraction, seeking to put on stage not simply particular memories but the act of memorising itself: the way events become randomly linked, one odd circumstance helping to summon another, every memory unstable, being remade each time we look back.
It was a mind-changing theatrical event, which flowed from ice age to our age, from the discovery of an ancient body to the uncovering of family history, from academics competing to lasso a long-lost biography to lovers trying to find a future.
