Mnemonic

 At two hours straight through this play is at the limit of my concentration without an icecream to refresh my synapses, and by the end my brain certainly felt it had been through a workout.  

Originally conceived and workshopped by Simon McBurney and Complicité, the play opens with a simple set of a chair and one man. Khalid Abdalla opens as himself then morphs into ‘Omar’ then others during the following couple of hours.  He starts with an entertaining lecture on memory, and how the brain works, but quite quickly diverts into thinking about his family then the London diaspora and this segment ends with a piece of audience participation to underline how closely humans are related to each other as well as how our own memories work.  I don't like audience participation but it was for good reason.

Kicking off from the way that the hippocampus in the brain is responsible for creating both memories and imagining the future, this spirals off into mixing the story (or stories) about the 5,000 year old man discovered in ice in 1991, with a story about a man whose partner has disappeared looking for her father, these narratives stirred in amongst many others all played by the small ensemble cast.  At the ovation I couldn’t quite believe how small the cast was. 

Often visually arresting, I found it intellectually engaging throughout although sometimes I was hanging  on by a thread trying to make the connections.  The final 15 minutes or so I found quite moving with some magic puppetry with a chair, and ending with some choreography that gave me some time to process what the play was getting at and, despite its simplicity, was great to look at.  I loved the brain disco and along the way there were some entertaining pieces such as the academic conference, funny and also making the point that there are as many versions of the truth as there are people. 

I liked the layering of ideas upon each other, making connections, and the reimagined nature of this production based on the memory of the first, which linked some of the themes very nicely.  And I liked the updating of references to our shared memories including Covid and Ukraine.  In the couple of hours we explored themes of memory, migration, our origins and how many human stories echo others even if they are thousands of years apart.  And how, in the end, we are all human. 

A bit of a jigsaw but the pieces were all pretty interesting, starting small and building into something much more than its parts.