Mnemonic | National Theatre
Mnemonic, a play about the strange, imaginative act of remembering, is given an extra extra-textual layer in this 25 year revival, as much a rumination on the original as it is a restaging.
A production by legendary theatre company Complicité, it’s a thick tangle of overlapping stories, as densely packed as neurons. There is a man grieving a lover who disappeared one night; a woman searching for a father she has never met; a (real-life) 5,000-year-old corpse pulled from the ice; a chipper Greek taxi driver with a story to tell. All are loosely related because, as the play’s Ted Talk-style opening tells us, we’re all related, all connected, through genetics and through memories.
This shared connection is stressed through some audience participation – as the play begins you’re asked to don a blindfold and clutch a leaf while you imagine the generations of your family queueing up behind you, back through history.
What follows is a surreal dreamscape, with the action jolting across time and space, sometimes glitching back and forth on a single moment like someone trying desperately to recall a long-forgotten episode from their past.
It’s a visual feast, with projections shifting the hue of the stage, furniture gliding around of its own volition, and props transforming into intricate puppets. One particularly impressive scene sees a character speak on the phone while person on the other side of the conversation is beamed onto his bare chest.
Narratively, it’s all very thinky but there’s also razor-sharp satire woven throughout, touching on everything from the war in Ukraine to Brexit and the original play (“I thought I was going to see something avant-garde,” says one character as he leaves the real National Theatre and enters the play’s fictional world).
Sometimes the abstract nature of the production, the sheer density of its ideas, make it feel a little boggy – just as you connect with one character, one thread, you’re yanked towards something else entirely.
But once you learn to let the play wash over you, to feel it rather than try to understand it, there is gold here, especially as it builds to a kinetic climax that encompasses the kind of contemporary dance and outre staging that put Complicité on the map more than 40 years ago. While Mnemonic doesn’t quite reach the heights of Complicité’s best work – for my money the superlative The Master and Margarita still tops the bunch – it remains a work of breathtaking ambition and shrewd execution. It’s a flawed masterpiece, perhaps, but a masterpiece nonetheless.