It’s twenty five years since Simon McBurney’s devised play first wowed audiences.
His Complicité company has always trailed a reputation for inventive and unconventional work and its trailblazing techniques and visions were unique outside of the esoteric world of avant garde dance. But in the intervening period devised theatre has shifted into a new dimension with productions such as Ben Duke’s Ruination and Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young’s Betroffenheit.
Text, movement, dance, theatre and film are now being combined in ways that were once unimaginable. Yet, if the brushed-up version of Mnemonic looks a little passé it is not without its pleasures.
An investigation/exploration of the relationship between memory and imagination, it is told through parallel narratives: the discovery of a male body that has been preserved in a glacier for 5000 years and the story of a woman who leaves her husband in search of her lost father.
As the remarkably agile cast (vocally and physically) disentangle truth from fabrications, false memories from scientific facts and self-deceptions from naked honesty the stage is alive with slithery options, physical and neurological. The most striking image is the chair (allegedly the chair from the original production) which morphs into a puppet of a human being.
Fascinating and frustrating.