Kostas Philippoglou and Eileen Walsh in Mnemonic at the National Theatre © Johan PerssonWhilst the world has moved on considerably since the year which brought us 9/11 and Novak Djokovic‘s very first Wimbledon title (topical!), the fine-tuning means that the challenging piece has aged well and remains as interesting, fascinating and downright beguiling as the original, with the merest soupçon of irritation thrown into the mix.
After the 20min set-up delivered by Khalid Abdalla (Dodi Fayed in TV’s The Crown) assuming the role which McBurney previously performed himself, we delve into three stories which run parallel on stage and interconnect via the narrative. A man tries to understand why the woman he loves, left after her mother’s funeral; that same woman searches for her possibly living father hoping to gain an understanding why her mother claimed he was already dead. Linking them, a hi-tech forensic analysis of a pre-Bronze Age man’s body, with carbon-dating estimating the corpse to be 5,300 years old, yet remarkably, in possession of copper tools previously thought to have been produced a thousand years later. Never one to shirk an opportunity to poke fun at the scientific community’s intellectual pomposity when asserting absolute facts, it is here that the company of players manage to extract maximum mirth and merriment. It comes in the guise of an international panel of experts who cannot agree on anything about the body of Ötzi the Iceman, even down to the importance of whether the hunter/shepherd goatherd/trader froze to death at an altitude of 3,000m or 3,200m on the side of a Tyrolean mountain.
As with all of Complicité’s work there is a strong emphasis on physical, visual, as well as intellectual theatre. For those who shrink at the very mention of audience participation, I can promise that it is minimal and more a variety of mindfulness performed in one’s seat, rather than anything as ghastly as tap dancing whilst dressed as a pineapple.
Rather like the iceman himself, in the assured hands of these players (Khalid Abdalla, Richard Katz, Tim McMullan, Eileen Walsh, Kostos Philippoglou, Laurenz Laufenberg, Sophie Steer, Thomas Arnold, Hisham Abdel Razek, Sarah Slimani and Arthur Wilson) the production has weathered remarkably well.
