FringeReview UK 2024

Mnemonic

National Theatre, London in association with Complicité

Genre: Adaptation, Contemporary, Devised, Drama, European Theatre, Historical, Interactive, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Puppetry, Theatre, Translation

Venue: National Theatre, Olivier

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“Where were you on June 24h 2016?” We play tricks on memory, but after 25 (or in this space 23) years Simon McBurney’s Complicité-conceived work Mnemonic returns to the National as its own proof of distortion; directed by him at the Olivier till August 10^th.

A man flees for his life. 5,200 years later Alice flees Omar to find her father but they all keep spiralling on the same helix. We are indeed all related as Khalid Abdalla tells us, avoiding banality by asking us to remember dates, don masks, feel the veined leaf in the bag we’re provided with. Taking McBurney’s original role, Abdalla’s simple TED-talk dissolves, a chair collapses, leaving his voice behind as he takes a phone-call, becomes Omar and storytelling trips us all up.

It’s then that Michael Levine’s set sleeks into abundant life: beds appear, plastic sheeting screens a blur of activity; the chair becomes an ancient corpse. Paul Anderson’s spectral lighting swirls a more solid space than the props. Christopher Shutt’s sound ranges from plangent solo cello to noir-ish thriller chords.

The infinite mirror replication of memory in a work on memory is here re-imagined, updated, even to new archaeological details, the war in Ukraine and a vividly-overwhelmed eastern-Polish hospital. Mnemonic is not what it was, but also clearer about what it was. A moment in a post-conflict world where Europe-flung connections might be freely made in an anxious, hopeful Millennium; a recent (1991) iceman discovery fresh enough before the decay of wonder set in. A time, almost, of innocence.

That’s poignant too. A programme essay by Dr Daphna Shohamy reflects on the time she saw the original production, where the “striking young woman” playing Alice (Katrin Cartlidge) reminded her of her dead sister. Or did they see it together before she died?

As McBurney elsewhere relates, Cartlidge herself died suddenly just after the run, in 2002. “How many mourned him when he disappeared… “ Her voice with other original collaborators haunted the sound system during rehearsal before re- recording. Cartlidge though remains. Revival becomes literally its own mnemonic; with the same roots, McBurney reminds us, as mourn.

The 125-minute straight-through narrative, conceived by McBurney with the original collaborators, is still largely intact. At this remove its Millennial angst seems almost endearing, certainly indulgent. Beyond those late 1990s spoof adverts with people chasing European capitals in a newly-opened world lies questions the period briefly allowed, before conflict closed our perspectives. In that sense Mnemonic celebrates a fragile window where we drilled into permafrost.

The seven-strong cast on any night is augmented by four others. Being Complicité naming roles merely sketches aides-memoires as the work recreates even performance as a memory of itself minutes before.

Abdalla doubles as Omar and – sculpted often naked in Anderson’s chiaroscuro lighting – the wind-stripped frozen iceman, later named Ötzi. Omar exits a theatre to find Alice’s gnomic voicemail. Eileen Walsh’s Alice disappears for her mother’s funeral and doesn’t contact him for nine months. Meanwhile they both discover avuncular avatars of Ötzi or themselves.

Sarah Slimani and Sophie Steer emerge as the hotelier and a couple of disputing archaeologists. This symposium led by Tim McMullan plays as obligatory comic relief where Otzi is labelled everything from shaman, hunter, shepherd, farmer, travelling copper-smelter and salesman. The iceman himself hulks behind on the wall, shadowing their world like a rebuking revenant.

Kostas Phillippoglou emerges as Omar’s avuncular Greek taxi driver who, on hearing his Egyptian roots declares they’re both where the (western) ancient world comes from.

Alice hooks up with possible Jewish roots in Poland, taught a Yiddish song by  Hisham Abdel Razek, who suggests her father was Jewish according to a suitcase: doubling as grave-goods. Each versioning of Alice’s ancestry ambushes memory and tweaks at DNA as she approaches a village too far. Sometimes we must choose to imagine even parents.

The cast’s completed by Thomas Arnold, Richard Katz, Arthur Wilson and Laurentz Lautenberg whose archaeologist’s German is guyed by the broken translator system and hyperbolic enthusiasm.

There’s striking movement, as the cast enact the iceman’s shadow on the back stage-wall in Roland Horvath’s subtly-understated video; which later gifts one final reveal. Elsewhere, the wind-crouched figure of Ötzi is replicated by all seven actors simultaneously invoking an infinite regression of ancestors and those fleeing persecution. At another juncture, they all do as Abdalla does in serial rotation: roll into Ötzi’s discovered position on a medical table. It becomes a ritual of ancestral muscle-memory.

An arresting production in itself, Mnemonic is still a ground-breaking work; though in the best sense a period piece. One though exhaling the frosted air of Europe-wide social democracy guarded by full-spectrum capitalist realism. Delusional as that turned out, and despite the slightly improbable war-updates, Mnemonic is treasurable, eloquent, a rare passport. It remembers what hope, connectedness and peace smelt like. It’s worth remembering that.

Published July 3, 2024 by Simon Jenner