Resumo de Mnemonic - Simon McBurney

Katrin Cartlidge died of complications due to pneumonia on
September 7, 2002. The 41-year-old actress was one of the
original creators of Theatre de Complicite?s devised play,
Mnemonic. Her tragic death occurred in the middle of their
two-year international tour and from that day every
performance was dedicated to her memory. The poignancy and
irony of that one futile gesture encompasses all of the
hope and profundity of Mnemonic. Mnemonic is a memory play
not just in name, but definition. Theatre, by nature, is an
act of memory.
Simon McBurney, the artistic director of Theatre de
Complicité, called Mnemonic an act of collisions. The play
was created by the collisions of the cast and crew who used
material from their own lives. The play includes a
collisions of words from a diversity of sources. The fusion
of memories that created Mnemonic helped form the highly
original work, a work of not just the casts? memories, but
rather, the memories of the human experience as a whole.
Mnemonic follows the journey of three people, two alive and
one long dead. In 1991 tourists descending the Alps
discovered a naked body emerging from the ice. The 5,300-
year-old Iceman?s life and death, and the myth surrounding
it, interweaves with the lives of a contemporary man and
woman struggling to find themselves and each other. Virgil,
alone in his flat, suffers from insomnia as he tries to
understand why his lover, Alice, left him 8 months before.
Alice travels across Eastern Europe on a pilgrimage to find
her father and, by doing so, attempts to uncover her own
identity. Memories and imaginings, pasts and presents,
truths and fictions all collide in this play. As Mcburney
describes the play: Stories of journeys, fragment, reflect,
repeat and revolve like the act of memory itself.
The characters find healing through pain and journeys. The
external scars on the Iceman are there in order to heal
internal maladies. ?You can see marks on the body. These
marks are tattoos. There are fifty-seven tattoos on his
body. A pen draws the Iceman?s tattoos live on to Virgil?s
back.?(34) When Virgil receives the tattoos, he is
attempting to heal his emotional scars from his
relationship with Alice. Virgil receives his tattoos in
between conversations with Alice and imaginings of her
life. When she final communicates with him after 8 months
of silence, she tells Virgil of her journey, of why she had
to leave and where she is. This communication is the
beginning of both of their healing. As Virgil turns into
the Iceman, his self-discovery has begun.

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