Review: MNEMONIC, National Theatre

It feels like artistic sacrilege to question Complicité. The Simon McBurney-helmed theatre company’s mastery of fluid physicality and ensemble devising has been internationally renowned for decades. Decades. Maybe that’s the problem: the original production of Mnemonic, now reanimated for the here and now on the Olivier stage at the National, premiered a quarter of a century ago – and before I was born.

Two story threads loop and intertwine: Alice abandons her partner Omar in search of her long-lost father. Whispers and clues send her journeying through the recesses of Europe. A Soviet watch. A pair of shoes. A prayer shawl. Jumbled puzzle pieces that will reveal, when arranged, the image of a life left behind.

A parallel story unfolds. Forensic experts bustle to decipher the mystery of a bronze age mummified body discovered frozen on a mountain. Fractured bones, an axe, clumps of hair. More puzzle pieces and dots to join. Mind maps are charted. Memories of other people’s lives are chased and discovered.

Fluidly spliced together, the narratives twist and turn but eventually melt into nothing. Throw backs and echoes of past lines – like the iceman (today known as Ötzi) and Alice, they, and we, are all humans on our journeys. Side characters bob up and down: A Greek taxi driver. A Jewish train passenger. All on their generational journey across one border and another. One eye on the past that haunts, another on a hopeful future.

The big picture focus ensures it can generate enough dramatic power, but the humanity that lies in details is noticeably absent. Alice and Omar are hollow shells, vessels to fast track the drama to the big picture pondering, which itself occasionally dips into a hodge-podge evocative of a philosophy undergrad’s narcotic musings. A rule of thumb: never a good sign when the first thought after the curtain falls is: and what?

It is stylistically as impressive as you would expect. Wispy silhouettes pirouette, props fly in and out. Scenes bleed into each other with breathless freneticism. Objects are imbued with a life of their own - a chair becomes a man, living, breathing, heaving its aching muscles. Ay there’s the rub. If you have seen a Complicité show you know the score. At some point someone will pick up a chair and twirl it over their head. Ersatz Philip Glass music hums portentously in the background. Rinse and repeat. Perhaps in 1999 its dreamlike dizziness was revolutionary. In 2024 it feels too predictable to truly dazzle.

Maybe I’m being harsh. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right? In any case, without the vital humanity beating at its core, the production doesn’t connect all the dots. Is this one Mnemonic to forget?

Mnemonic plays at The National Theatre until 10 August

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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