In 1991 some climbers on a 3,000-metre peak in the southern Tyrol, where Italy meets Austria, discovered a corpse sticking out of a glacier. When the body was recovered there was speculation that it was no mountaineering accident. Some believed that the body might be that of an Italian music professor who had disappeared on the same route in 1941. Others suggested that it came from the Middle Ages.
It was only after the body, with its strange, leathery skin and grass-like shoe, was removed to the University of Innsbruck for carbon dating that it became clear that the Ice Man, as he was to become known, was not 50 or even 500 years old, but dated from the Neolithic period 5,200 years ago.
"Five thousand years? How long ago is that?" wonders one of the characters in Theatre de Complicite's latest show, Mnemonic, a devised piece that uses the discovery of the Ice Man to reflect on the nature of time and memory, our capacity to distort history, and our attempts to retell the past.
Five thousand years. Think of the time between us and Socrates and then double it. Or think of it as 3,000 years before Jesus.
Ask people about 5,000 years ago and a significant number will imagine that we had only just dragged ourselves out of the swamp. It seems such an inconceivably long time ago. As Simon McBurney's character Virgil says in Mnemonic: "Perhaps one of the most astonishing discoveries of modern times is the immensity of the past."
McBurney, the artistic director of Theatre de Complicite, is unfazed by that immensity. Having grown up with an archaeologist father who regarded 125,000 years ago as yesterday, McBurney considers 5,000 years a mere wink. "Our wonder at what is behind us forms part of our sense that the past is the present. The past itself does not exist. It exists only as part of us now," he suggests.
For McBurney, Mnemonic is a very personal piece of work, both a continuation of the work he did in collaboration with John Berger on The Vertical Line, about the 30,000-year-old cave paintings discovered in Chauvet in France, and a result of the questions he has asked about his own identity since he was a small boy living near Cambridge. "I grew up in a warm and loving family, but living on the outskirts of Cambridge I always wondered who I was."
The sense of not quite belonging is common to almost all children, yet unlike our forebears that sense of dislocation follows many of us into adulthood. "This piece came out of a feeling from myself and my friends that can only be described as rupture," says McBurney. "We have an unease about who we are and where we belong. Ironically we live at a time when we know more about the past than at any time in history. People feel somehow dispossessed and yet we now have huge records and resources that tell us who and where we are and where we come from. The two things just don't add up. Perhaps our sense of rupture comes from a loss - a loss of a sense of continuity. We are so sure of the importance of our own individual lives that we are curiously unaware of merely being part of a continuous movement of energy through time and space."
It is impossible to think of the past without invoking memory, and one of the fascinating things about Mnemonic is the way it makes us reconsider the act of remembering itself. McBurney, whose father came from North American native stock, was fascinated by the work with native American peoples of anthropologist Jack Goody, who noticed that almost all oral societies have a word for remembering but none for memory itself. When North American Indians tell the creation myth, it changes as it is passed down from father to son. It changes for the occasion on which it is told. In effect it is a living thing and each remembering of the myth is a creative act.
This is in sharp contrast to the way we treat memory. As McBurney says: "We tend to think of memory as a process of accumulation - like putting money in the bank. We place huge store on accuracy when we remember something. But scientists have proved that memory and the brain don't work like that."
During the performance of Mnemonic, McBurney gives the audience a memory exercise. First he asks us to remember a particular day in the past. Then he asks us to project forward and think of a day in the future. What is fascinating is that the image of one is just as clear as the other.
"You get the same quality of image," explains McBurney, "because of the interaction between memory and imagination. When we remember something and when we imagine something it makes exactly the same patterns in the brain. It means that the past and future are dependent upon each other. The subject of what we remember quickly becomes for me about where we are now. The past only exists as part of us now."
And that, in a sense, sums up Mnemonic at its very best, as it interweaves the stories of the present with those of the past and links the joys and catastrophes of our own century with those of 5,000 years ago and makes us question the very nature of progress itself. For each and every person in the audience the show operates as a personal mnemonic that prods our own memories into action, taking us back into childhood and back down the ages, through the shadows of all those who stand behind us, until we reach a point 5,000 years in the past where a man, our relative, lies down upon a freezing stone high up in Tyrol and dies. An event so far away, and yet I swear I can remember it. A body so stiff and cold, and yet I feel I might be able to reach out and warm it with my own.
Mnemonic is at the Riverside Studios, London W6 (0181-237 1111), till January 8.
