The play “Mnemonic” first appeared on the stage in 1999, quickly establishing itself as a classic, and it has been reactivated and ‘reimagined’ for a new production at the National Theatre in London.
Sean Sheehan
The drama does not begin with the lights going out but with an actor on the stage delivering a monologue that segues at times into a lecture on the strange nature of memory. It’s an odd start to a drama and becomes more so when audiences, well familiar with the need to switch off phones, are asked to place their mobile in a small pouch that was waiting for them on their seats when they arrived. Another little bag on their seat is now to be opened for a bout of audience participation involving a blindfold and a leaf.
Mnemonic is about memory and the way it serves as a form of mental migration in our search for identity and meaning. We are born of two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on until we come to over 2,000 ninth great-grandparents. Within the frame of the last 400 years, we arrive across twelve generations and this amounts to 4,094 ancestors. If just one of them had had sex with one of our other ancestors, then we would not be here today.
What are the chances that you or I are related to the man who died close to the border of what is now Italy and Austria? Due to global warming, his body appeared out of alpine ice in 1991. A post-mortem established that he was over 5,000 years old. The mystery of who he was and why and how he died provides one of the two main narratives in Mnemonic
The second narrative concerns the disappearance of a woman, Alice, who was last seen at the funeral of her mother. She had set off to search for the father she never knew, leaving her husband clueless about her whereabouts until he receives a phone call from her out of the blue. These two narratives, apparently unrelated, provide the plot for what unfolds at the Oliver theatre as the dramatization of a concept – memory – through the metaphor of travel.
The man found in the ice was on a journey and one of the funniest scenes in the play is when a group of ‘experts’ argue over who he was, where he was going and how he died. Alice is also on a personal journey and the audience share her odyssey into the past as she tries to discover the truth about her parents.
As a piece of theatre, Mnemonic is astoundingly good and the choreography and use of silhouettes for story-telling is dazzlingly effective. It may not be as successful in probing the question of how and why each of us constructs the bank of memories we do. The answers to that enigma are buried, not 3000m high in the Alps, but in the ice of the unconscious.
“Mnemonic” is at the National Theatre, London.
(Images supplied by the National Theatre)
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