Culture | Theatre Revived after 25 years, this intensely humane and richly layered show from Simon McBurney’s Complicité asks us what it is to remember and to forget, and whether culture or chaos shapes our destiny. It blends the story of a 5,200-year-old Neolithic man’s frozen corpse and that of a contemporary Irish London woman tracing her absent father’s journey across Europe. All to illustrate that migration, and the human or elemental violence that prompts it, are endlessly recurring facts of life.
And that the stories we tell ourselves are necessary, but necessarily inaccurate. It’s timely, thoughtful, sometimes challenging, but also witty enough to start with an in-joke that Complicité “used to be funny”. Back in 1999, McBurney directed, supervised the devising of and assumed centre stage in Mnemonic – a term for something that prompts a memory.
In this reimagined version Khalid Abdalla takes the lead, asking us in an explanatory preamble to put on eye masks, fondle a leaf, and imagine our pasts and our antecedents stretching back in time. When the masks come off he’s become an audience member called Omar, who’s embarrassed by the woo-woo nonsense, then mortified when his phone goes off, but also frantic. Because the call might be from his lover Alice (Eileen Walsh) who has disappeared with their savings to search for the father she believed dead.
With the elegantly simple blend of design, music and physicality that distinguishes Complicité, sce.