The week in theatre: Mnemonic; The Secret Garden; The Herds – review

Olivier; Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London
Complicité’s extraordinary 1999 play proves a little more forgettable second time round; an al fresco Secret Garden remakes the story in surprising ways; and the team behind Little Amal prepare to take on climate disaster

This is not quite what I remembered. Going into Simon McBurney’s Mnemonic I had in mind a cascade of images from its first staging 25 years ago: I recalled it as a show that, though dextrously physical, was trying to embody an abstraction, seeking to put on stage not simply particular memories but the act of memorising itself: the way events become randomly linked, one odd circumstance helping to summon another, every memory unstable, being remade each time we look back.

It was a mind-changing theatrical event, which flowed from ice age to our age, from the discovery of an ancient body to the uncovering of family history, from academics competing to lasso a long-lost biography to lovers trying to find a future.

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