Mnemonic @ Olivier Theatre...

Last Thursday night Stuart and I went to see Simon McBurney’s memory poser Mnemonic at the Olivier Theatre on London's glitzy South Bank.

 

Mnemonic begins with a lecture to the audience by the "director" Simon (Khalid Abdalla), who encourages the audience to try to recall past memories. We have been given a bag containing a eye mask and a leaf. We regress to being 6 years hold holding our parents’ hands.  

 

The play then tells two parallel stories: in one, a man named Virgil (who was Simon) tries to find his girlfriend, Alice (Eileen Walsh), who has run away to Europe to hunt for her long-lost father; the other relates the discovery of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,000-year-old mummified corpse. Through recurring images and situations, the play draws parallels between these stories, focusing on the theme of the role of the imagination in recapturing the past.

 

The play is a mind-bending experimental odyssey that’ll rewire your brain chemistry.

 

So, it's hard to describe what we saw. It's a play about the act of memory, about migration, about ancestry, and about how we tell stories. At times it's baffling.

 

That said, it's also very entertaining. It’s funny. There are references to Brexit and Ukraine and smart phones. There is a hilarious panel of experts each confidently say who they thought the iceman was, each with a different, essentially unprovable opinion.

 

The acting is top notch. Christopher Shutt’s sound design fabulous. Michael Levine’s sets are simple yet evocative. And Paul Anderson’s silhouetting lightning design literally highlights the action beautifully.

 

The play starts slowly but develops into something dazzling, enormous, almost unknowable.

 

I'm still thinking about it almost a week later.

 

(Oh, and I forgot to mention. There is a lot of male nudity. Now that tells you how perplexing the piece was that I almost forgot that!)