Concept and Director: Simon McBurney
Revived 25 years after it first premiered, Complicité’s Mnemonic is about journeys of identification, the marks that our ancestry leaves on our bodies and the deeply human need to know who we are. ‘Reimagined’ for 2024 in collaboration with its new company, two core stories about that quest for understanding intertwine; a personal search set now and one beginning in 1991 with a major scientific discovery, but the play visits the 1940s, 1970s and the 21st- century while taking the audience to mountains, laboratories, press conferences, train carriages, hotels and domestic rooms. And it is clear that a quarter of a century on, no one builds a technical and cinematic story quite like Complicité.
Alice is missing leaving Otis to wonder where she has gone; meanwhile, but also years, before, the Iceman is found in the snow. As scientists and anthropologists try to uncover who he was, how he died and the culture that surrounded him, Alice is on the train to Europe looking for her father. As both follow a breadcrumb trail towards greater self-knowledge, the past and the future are constantly rewritten.
Across its two-hour running time, Mnemonic mixes a number of storytelling devices together that engage the audience and seek to wrongfoot the viewer as the tale actively morphs and reforms throughout. It begins with a direct address from actor Khalid Abdalla, presenting a comic monologue about the original production and, in revealing some of his own heritage, uses light audience participation to encourage the viewer to consider the potency of particular memories, how they are formed and the line of ancestors that bring us to this moment.
This frames the dual narrative that follows which blurs academic reporting, first-hand testimony, press stories and conference presentations with acted scenes, reconstructions, televised interviews, puppetry and choreographed movement to suggest the ‘turbulence’ of existence, a word that comes to refer to internal emotion, climatic changes and the sporadic movement of peoples that results in the mixed-DNA of the Iceman and later Europeans. The fluidity with which Complicité move between these different techniques is something of a trademark and is used to filmic effect in the Olivier which enhances the proscenium style adopted for Boys from the Blackstuff with constricting black boxes to create a long cinematic frame designed by Michael Levine that facilitates quick cuts and the splicing together of narrative tracks.
It also allows the story to move from the Austrian Alps to Italy, Germany, Poland and Lithuania as well as London using a particular visual language devised by the cast with director Simon McBurney – notably in the transitions between Abdalla’s present-day romantic crisis and the naked physicality of the Iceman that he also comes to represent as both a corporeal body and a symbolic representation of ancestry and inheritance. Christopher Shutt’s sound design is equally arresting, unexpectedly moving between live speech and pre-recorded dialogue as though questioning the repetition of our identity narratives which come from within and beyond us at the same time.
Mnemonic is perhaps a little longer than it needs to be but is a technically complex play to deliver. The ensemble led by Abdalla, Eileen Walsh and Tim McMullan as Otis, Alice and the lead scientist are in complete harmony with the material throughout while playing taxi drivers and chambermaids, fractious academics and train companions. “People like you are always travelling to find problems,” a taxi driver tells Alice, “and people like me are always travelling to escape them,” Whatever the direction of travel, Mnemonic suggests that the essence of human behaviour is just to find out who we are.
Runs until 10 August 2024
