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 stor...