Mnemonic (review)

Mnemonic. Devised by Theatre de Complicite. Riverside Studios, London. 13 December 1999.

This will be a very conflicted performance review. Without a doubt, Theatre de Complicite is one of a handful of truly creative and productive theatre companies working in Britain. Without a doubt, their latest production, Mnemonic, is visually stunning, inventive, engaging, and highly skilled. And yet, I was torn between avid appreciation and deep annoyance when I viewed the play (which I saw twice).

The production took up associations between mnemonic memory devices, modern technology, global migration, and the desire to know our collective human pasts. Two narratives were interwoven; one, the 1991 discovery of the Iceman in the Austrian Alps--a frozen body, quite intact, thought to be 5000 years old. In the second, a woman searched for her unknown father, criss-crossing Europe while her mate, Virgil, waited with his mobile phone and his memories of their last encounters. Both were quest narratives, the one personal but contextualized as typical of humans hunting for their connections to their pasts; the other public and scientific, but gradually revealed as metaphor. Simon McBurney, in addition to conceiving of and directing Mnemonic, was the central actor.

The various stories were played through and across the spaces of other stories. The transformation of objects and bodies was central to the idea that humans carry pasts concretely within our container-selves, in our brains, our postures, our nakedness. (McBurney's body was his, Virgil's, and the Iceman's, but the more arresting substitution was a chair, from the company's previous production of Ionesco's The Chairs, which became McBurney's grandfather and the body of the Iceman under examination and exhibition). Alice searched for her father following the trail of his watch, his shoes, and his prayer shawl, through Germany, Poland, Latvia and the Ukraine. Correspondingly, the search for scientific "facts" about the Iceman brought together scientists from all over Europe and the U.S., and of course, there was a border dispute about whether Austria or Italy "owned" the body of the Iceman. The production "showed" human empathy through images of bodies, their fascination with each other, and their gradual, emerging equivalency.

At this point we begin to approach troublesome aspects in the production. In spite of attention to cultural specificity and difference, a human equivalency emerged as the dominant premise of the evening. The amusing and typical conflicts between the national styles of the academic researchers and the diverse range of travelers Alice encountered on her journey folded into one image, albeit a very powerful one, at the climax of the show: each of the company, in turn, took the place of the Iceman in a choreographed sequence of images, like a slow sequence of film or video frames. The substitution made a "family of man" statement representing white Europeans as essentially similar in their travels, their struggles to survive, and their bodiliness. Complicite may not be aware of the strong message of human homogeneity the production carried--there was much tenderness, empathy, and beauty in the images as well--but finally, the world-view of the production was a return to universalism and even a kind of fatalism.

Before the play, McBurney addressed the audience as himself and talked about memory, setting up the context for the evening. He asked audience members to cover their eyes with a mask (which was taped to the seats along with a leaf) and to imagine they were five years old, holding the hand of their mother in their left hand and their father in their right. He extended this family linkage through several generations, suggesting that feeling the leaf was feeling the pattern of ancestry. As he took the linkages further back through time, he finally concluded, "It means that you are related to everyone sitting in this theatre." For my part, I could not help wondering how many people in the theatre wanted to imagine holding their parents' hands, or even knew who those parents were, or why they had to be...