Memory is fiction and fiction is a form of memory, explains the actor Khalid Abdalla (The Crown) in his opening monologue of Mnemonic. He explains how memory involves a set of electrical impulses which create a pattern in the brain each time a person remembers something. This means the pattern is never exactly the same and so all memories are a memory of a memory of a memory etc. Therefore, a memory is an endless creative act of imagination (or fiction).

Mnemonic, originally conceived and directed by Simon McBurney in a co-production with Complicite, premiered in 1999. So, 25 years after its first staging, Mnemonic is hitting the stage of The National Theatre and it is certainly an original revival. It’s a play involving a collection of lost people searching for purpose. Specifically, or rather ambiguously portrayed, the plot of Mnemonic entwines the story of a corpse found under the ice of the Ötztal Alps, whilst a woman is looking for her father, and meanwhile a man searches for his lost lover. These interrelated stories trigger a dissection into the subject of memory, albeit a rather surface level exploration – like a thin sheet of ice. Abdalla’s introductory monologue peaks with some lofty questions; how does memory work? What is the purpose of memory? How do relationships with the human and the natural world intersect? Unfortunately, his memory fails him in remembering to properly answer these questions. But then again, forgetting is an essential component of memory, as Abdalla ironically points out. Mnemonic is, however, successful in conveying the crucial message that it is stories which keep memory and indeed our human conditions alive. Stories like Mnemonic, perhaps?

The play’s greatest strength is how it begins. Abdalla enters the stage and breaks the fourth wall by directly promising the audience that he is going to deliver a short speech to introduce the play. His monologue involves audience interaction, notably by instructing the audience to pick up their leaf and eye mask that has been placed next to each seat. While leaf in hand, Abdalla invites us to imagine ourselves as five-year-olds in the school playground, with the hands of our parents on our shoulders and then the hands of their parents on theirs. Oh, and the leaf ridges symbolise the lines of our ancestry. It’s a laboured attempt to exercise our memory but it still manages to plant the significance of origins in our heads – which is important as this is to be an omnipotent theme of Mnemonic. Then the magic happens. With apparent effortlessness, Abdalla’s meta direct address to the audience thereafter seeps into the rest of the play in a metaphysical transition. I hadn’t even realised the play had, in fact, ‘officially’ began when Abdalla first entered the stage – but it had. Even now, it is ambiguous whether Abdalla was in character (playing Virgil) or simply being himself when he spoke his first line. The delivery was so convincing, I initially thought it was a stand-up improv speech. Surely, that is the skill of acting mastered. Truly astonishing.

Abdalla becomes a mad scientist-like figure in his self-discovery of how the 1969 Saharan winds, which thawed the Ice Man, loosely link to the winds of migration which has parallels to the human condition because ‘we have turbulence in us.’ Yes, it’s a futile and far-stretched linkage. Meanwhile, Abdalla’s character maddens himself with his revelation over his lover’s contradictory voicemail, screaming to his friend on the phone at 2.30am saying ‘she can’t wait and follow.’ But these revelations do not feel profound enough that they warrant Abdalla’s passionate anger and desperate breakdown. Instead, the attempted metaphoric interconnections are literal, laboured and sterile.

The visual images (created by the actors, set and lighting) are striking in their poignancy and the success of them overrides the disjointed dialogue which does not meet the profundity which Abdalla promises us in his opening monologue. For instance, the script never really unpicks the significance of the play’s collision between migration and memory. So unfortunately, thereafter the play mainly deflates. I think it would have a been better as a one man show played by Abdalla. The script does, however, tease out some modern-day jokes on migration within the context of Uber drivers and their riders and this gains a proper laugh from the audience. The director is also clever in his use of multi-rolling, causing the cast to feel much larger than the reality (eleven actors). The play is also effective in its blurring of the past and present via the use of overlapping voices, both pre-recorded and live. This is important because a blurring of past and present day catches at the very essence of memory.

Abdalla is naked for most of the performance, creating some stark visual images evoking that of Shelley’s ‘creature’ in Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein (also performed in the National Theatre with the actors, Cumberbatch and Miller). Mnemonic bravely confronts nakedness as being a vehicle to express the human condition via a vulnerable and raw lens, this is reinforced by Abdalla’s naked body being bathed in a yellow light: exposed and confronted almost like Adam in The Book of Genesis.

One weakness of the play is how the audience is never graced with enough information on any of the characters, especially Alice played by Eileen Walsh. How are we meant to become invested in her role and her hysterics when we know merely nothing on why she left and why she hasn’t returned? Most exasperatingly we are ignorant to the trauma she has faced on her travels. This absence of stability and clarity, shared by the characters and the audience, feeds into the play’s sense of foreignness achieved by the blurring of sounds and dates and therefore time achieving a real sense of a dream-like, otherworldly timelessness. This potential is interesting but, in my memory, remains just as potential rather than a reality. My least favourite part of the play, for instance, was the one-dimensional and repetitive interview reporter scene which transported me back to my GCSE Drama days. The recreation of the American subway is equally predictable, static and cringy and only disservices the play.

Overall, Mnemonic begins with some beautiful visuals and glimpses of poignancy but ends leaving the audience discombobulated and confused by the play’s failure to tie all these compositions together comprehensively. But I suppose that’s a bit like memory.