Mnemonic, National Theatre review — the Iceman cometh once again in captivating Complicité revival

Memory: the original unreliable narrator. It is the subject of Complicité’s spellbinding show Mnemonic, which, with perfect irony, has become an act of memory in itself. First staged in 1999, it is now brought back to life, tenderly reconstructed from its original state — much like the lost Iceman at its heart — and freighted, as every memory is, with all that has happened since.

Part detective story, part philosophical enquiry, it comes with a far greater political charge in an age of rancid arguments about borders, walls, migration and climate change. But it is also a profound celebration of the nature of theatre: the collective act of imagination that allows us to collaborate in bringing the past to life; the empathy essential to understanding our place in a history many millennia old.

It begins with a prologue that emphasises that imaginative effort in action. After chatting to the audience about the biochemistry of memory-making, Khalid Abdalla as Omar (the part originally taken by director Simon McBurney), encourages us to slip on blindfolds and call to mind memories both recent and more deeply buried.

Nine hundred people are invited to picture themselves aged six: a moment that both unites and separates us — every memory is different, and yet here we are recalling ourselves as tiny children. That combination of individual and communal experience is essential to theatre — but it is also at the nub of this show, which keeps reminding us of the transience of boundaries, of the common urge to feel at home, of the things that unite and yet divide the people living on Earth at any given point.

Gradually we roll into the story proper. Omar’s partner, Alice (Eileen Walsh, a desolate, frantic presence), has disappeared, gripped by the urge to find her long-lost father. That narrative is tangled up for him, and for us, with the riveting story of the Iceman, a 5,000-year-old body found frozen in the Austrian-Italian Alps in 1991. While Alice hurtles around Europe, pursuing faint traces of her own origins, scientists puzzle over the Iceman and what befell this man who died alone on a freezing mountainside. Who was he? What was he wearing? Why and whom did he flee?

The narrative is fragmented, darting about like the mind as it pieces together recollections. McBurney’s staging and Michael Levine’s design combine stark simplicity — a table, a bed, a few chairs — with voicemails, videos and other technological interventions that speak to the weird combination of connectivity and loneliness that defines our age. A translucent curtain sometimes glides across the stage, like a mountain snowfall or like the fog of memory, leaving the action semi-discernible.

The show is a little long and some points about climate and the current wars feel clunky. But it’s still a luminous piece of theatre: witty, elusive, intensely beautiful and humane. A versatile ensemble is constantly on the move, giving a potent sense of a restless continent and a shifting past. There is particularly wonderful work from Tim McMullan as a mild-mannered academic trying to keep control as professors and reporters squabble over the identity of the Iceman. And Abdalla is excellent and moving as Omar, whose frozen emotional state becomes tangled up with the mummified corpse, as he lies there naked and stiff centre-stage.

In one exceptionally powerful passage, the entire cast take turns in his place, rolling across a table to create a tumbling chain of humanity, alive one moment, dead the next. In the end, it is our ability to imagine this lost, lonely soul that is at the heart of this unique show.

★★★★★

To August 10, nationaltheatre.org.uk