The mind is a camera, the memory a photograph, the emotion an artistic oeuvre.
Review of the play Mnemonic starring Khalid Abdalla, shown at the National Theatre
The brain categorises memories according to your emotional attachment to them. Aah! – a shock instils this moment with the white-hot flash of a photographic capture – you remember because it stunned you. When I fell in love I was wearing shorts, I remember the shorts only because I fell in love while wearing them. He wore a Calvin Klein cap, anytime he wears it I remember that day. The memory is triggered by the association I’ve placed on it. Calvin Klein, despite also reminding me of the sultry black and white ads of the 90s with a freckled Kate Moss and boisterous Mark Walburg, will forever be entwined with the day I fell in love. But how certain am I of this? What are the possibilities that I am misremembering his black cap because of photographs of lustful Kate and Mark pressed against one another? Or was it a video, rather than a photograph? He owns a Calvin Klein hat, I believe….
Mnemonic, shown in The National Theatre for the 25th anniversary of the play’s original opening, presented the viewers with similar quandaries, exposing the infinitesimal realities that exist when the mind associates one thing to another, imprinting it as truth in their memory. We are creative to our core, whether we feel it or not. In 3,250 BCE, a man on a mountain dies by the hands of an arrow, a man fights the stiffness of his fingers as he plays the piano in his own personal mountain-to-climb in the 1940's, and in 2024, a woman decides not to climb the Alps in search of a father she never met. All time periods are interlinked by a mountain, an image-object that allows for the possibility of time travel.
We, in the instant of watching the play or the split-second of contemplating it, are attempting to reconcile a captured memory. The image-object of it extends past a point beyond our bodily possibilities which annoys us to no end. We believe it to be there. We attempt with every molecular-effigy of our synaptic connections to reverse time’s brutish insistence on directing us forward towards death by forcing it to stop. To ponder. To witness. This is the act of remembrance. Memory is a facet of time. Time is the watch face of our endless path as human beings on a planet that spins at an angle, 23.5 degrees to be exact. Mnemonic is a play that presents, in the most imaginative way, our interconnectivity to others not just of our time and generation but in perpetuity.
Mnemonic was shown at the National Theatre from 22 June — 10 August 2024 in the Oliver Theatre starring Khalid Abdalla. I saw it on the closing night and wrote these thoughts in my notes app, only to abandon them. This too is an act of remembrance.