At the National Theatre

Mnemonic (at the National Theatre until 10 August) isn’t really a play about memory, or memory aids or triggers, though it’s quite insistent that it is. And its main narrative threads – the discovery, in the Dolomites in 1991, of the naturally preserved body of a man who lived more than five thousand years ago; a woman’s search for her father across Europe and the downward spiral of the lover she leaves behind – do function a little like memories, in that they assemble coherent stories from fragmentary records and resonant objects.

The process of remembering, we’re told in an opening monologue by Khalid Abdalla, who later plays Omar (the abandoned lover), is essentially ‘the same as the process of the imagination’. But resonant objects aren’t mnemonics, they are merely suggestive. And Mnemonic is less concerned with the problem of memory than with questions of ancestry and kinship ties. At the start of the play the audience is invited to consider the fractal patterns that such ties form over generations by putting on a blindfold and tracing the veins of a leaf: our best hope for order and connection among the chaos of climate change, war, displacement, forced migration and the whole tumult of human history – however disordered and dysfunctional our key relationships may feel in the moment.

That Mnemonic claims and believes itself to be a play about memory says something about the way Complicité, the company that created it, has a tendency to mistake dazzling coups de théâtre for meaning. Some of the cleverest parts of the production describe or embody memory; therefore it must be a play ‘about’ memory. But the main way in which this new production embodies memory is that it’s a revival of a play first performed in 1999: an attempt to remember the original productions in order to bring the play back to life, and reorient it in terms of the preoccupations of the present. This is trickier than it sounds because of the way Complicité’s work emerges from a collaborative ‘devising’ method, whose presiding genius always used to be the lead actor too.

‘Simon McBurney used to do this,’ Abdalla explains in his speech, which begins by acknowledging ‘the origins of this show’. The chair on an otherwise empty stage is from the original production, and belonged to McBurney’s father, ‘an archaeologist fascinated by deep time’. Eventually Abdalla receives a mobile phone call, now in character as Omar, watching his own mini-lecture with some scepticism: ‘I’m at the National Theatre,’ he hisses. As he mimes an apologetic shuffle out of his row and into the foyer, he bemoans the lack, so far, of Complicité’s famous brand of physical theatre, and the fact they’re supposed to be, or were once, funny – but it is, after all, a revival. ‘Sounds like they’re scraping the barrel,’ says the friend on the other end of the line.

But we all know they’re not. If any new play by a British company from the last 25 years deserved the full National Theatre revival treatment, it was Mnemonic. ‘I think about the world differently now than when I entered the theatre, and I know that I shall remember Mnemonic all my life,’ Lynn Gardner wrote in the Guardian in 2003. I can’t pretend I saw it (Abdalla admits the same in his opening monologue), but I did catch up with the bandwagon a few years later, in my first year at university, when I saw A Disappearing Number, Complicité’s 2007 show based on G.H. Hardy’s mathematical collaborations with Srinivasa Ramanujan.

I was awestruck: the multilingual, apparently non-hierarchical company; their simultaneously precise and low-key physicality; the ingeniously fluid transitions between scenes and lavish deployment of high-tech elements (lighting effects, projection), with original music by Nitin Sawhney, all combining in interlocking layers of storytelling that animated complex ideas and dramatised the human lives behind them. I can still vividly recall certain images from the play: a character frantically writing equations on a blackboard, turning slowly in a circle, the furiousness conveyed by powdered chalk pouring out of one the blackboard’s corners. If you engaged with university or fringe theatre at all in the early 2000s, you couldn’t move for Complicité’s imitators, ‘elucidating’ abstract theoretical problems with casually virtuosic dance duets.

Nostalgia is the predominant mode of Mnemonic: A Site, a book – ‘more a place to visit than a narrative to be followed’ – produced by Complicité to mark the revival. Testimony from company members, fans and expert witnesses are interspersed with rehearsal and production photographs, fragments from Complicité’s archives and crazed design flourishes: a facsimile Eurostar ticket, because that’s how Alice’s journey across Europe begins; double-page spreads that contain only a word or two in giant capital letters. Many of the contributors make the most of the opportunity to pirouette around the subject of memory and its mysteries. ‘An astonishingly rash prediction for a woman with an unreliable memory,’ Gardner writes of the famous line from her Guardian review which also appears on the new production’s promotional posters. ‘My mind was blown. My reaction was fullbodied. It was beguiling. I was hooked,’ Complicité’s senior creative producer, Tim Bell, writes of attending an early production of Mnemonic long before he joined the company. ‘Now it is 2024 and I am producing Mnemonic at the National Theatre.’

Caught up in the fun and sadness of remembering the original productions, everyone continues to take for granted that Mnemonic is a play about memory, without ever explaining how, exactly. ‘It had begun as “The Memory Show”,’ Judith Dimant, its original producer, writes. ‘We were all part of the story … where had we come from? … what was our past? … what were our memories?’ Marcus du Sautoy is a bit more precise: ‘The key to memory is understanding a pattern, a mnemonic that helps us to compress the data,’ which ‘gives us a chance to distinguish the story from the randomness and allows us to make sense of our place in this world’. But a few pages on there are script notes, presumably in McBurney’s hand, which say: ‘Chair as mnemonic, as image for generations … stone as mnemonic for turning off mobile phone’ – confirming my sense that memory, its patterns and triggers have a loose metaphorical function in the play; a subject of serious interrogation, not so much.

‘We hope that by remaking Mnemonic,’ Bell writes, ‘we are making a work of art capable of existing in a state of perpetual change, that meets an audience anew every time.’ If this is the measure of success, then the new Mnemonic is a miss as much as a hit, and the book’s layout – an inspired pastiche of OK Computer-style late 1990s design by Russell Warren-Fisher – draws our attention to one of the main reasons. The new production is supposed to be a full transposition into the present, with video calls and voice notes, Uber rides and scenes in a field hospital on the border between Poland and Ukraine. But often it feels only half-updated, on both a surface level (at one point a character makes a joking reference to Enya) and in its underlying lack of engagement with digital culture, social networks and the ways they have transformed our sense of ancestry, connection, order, chaos and, yes, memory. Especially compared with, say, ECHO, the Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s latest experiment in using an apparently live international video call as a theatrical device, which has just finished a run at the Royal Court. A literal-minded question hangs in the air: surely, in 2024, Alice’s search for her father would begin, and maybe also end, online?

So much of Complicité’s power used to flow from the revelatory efficiency of the storytelling, each brilliant moment tightly sprung with deeper and wider truths. It’s all somewhat reminiscent of the trajectory of another modern classic celebrating an anniversary this year, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, published forty years ago: a novel which inspired a legion of imitators, until at some point nobody except Craig Raine wanted to write like that any more. But whereas Kundera spent the rest of his career trying to repeat the same trick, McBurney has continued to innovate, most strikingly with 2016’s The Encounter, a one-man show that delivered three-dimensional binaural audio directly into the audience’s headphones (‘restaged’ very effectively via an online livestream during the first Covid lockdown).

Which means he probably deserves the benefit of the doubt with the revival of Mnemonic, the most plausible version of which may go like this: over time, a theatre company like Complicité accumulates an immense and important archive. They decide to engage directly and creatively with the curatorial problem this presents by restaging one of their most famous productions, which happens to be concerned with reassembling coherent stories from fragmentary records and resonant objects, so it’s also a commentary on the processes of retrieval and revival. The result is a brilliant meta-reflection on how to deal with what scholars have termed ‘performance remains’: there are still miracles in those mountains, but also diminishing returns.