The Ethics of Indeterminacy: Theatre de Complicite's ‘Mnemonic’

Abstract

Theatre de Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, and has since established its reputation as one of Britain's leading experimental physical theatre companies. Here, Helen Freshwater discusses the construction, performance, and implications of one of their recent works, Mnemonic, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and has since toured to London's National Theatre and the John Jay College Theatre in New York. The work questions our metaphorical conceptualization of memory, displacing the conventional model of retrieval with an understanding of memory based upon a performative paradigm. This is memory as an act of imagination: transient; grounded upon narrative; open to interpretation; intrinsically corporeal. Freshwater interrogates the impact of the performance's incompletion, addressing the ethical issues raised by recognzing the indeterminacy of the past. Under Simon McBurney's direction, the original cast comprised Catherine Schaub Abkarian, Katrin Cartlidge, Richard Katz, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Kostas Philippoglou, and Daniel Wahl. Helen Freshwater is currently completing her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh and will shortly be taking up a post as Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the forthcoming anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).