What is the brain? It is a bundle of memories, shaping the centre of who we are as individuals? Is it there to create an illusion that there’s a constant ‘us’ as we lurch from random moment to random moment? Can you find genius inside it if you slice it thinly enough? Or is it just a lump of tissue? Nick Payne’s new play Incognito touches on all of these ideas and more in a gripping, intense, and ultimately moving hour and a half at Oxford’s North Wall Arts Centre this week.
Brains, whatever their function, need to be in gear from the off because Incognito certainly doesn’t give its audience an easy ride. Three main strands of plot weave in and out of each other: one strand is based around the rather remarkable true story of the scientist who stole Albert Einstein’s brain after performing his autopsy, spending the rest of his life searching it for the hidden secrets of Einstein’s genius. The second strand follows Henry, a young man who, following brain surgery in the 1950s to relieve his epilepsy, is unable to create any new memories for the rest of his life. The third, set in the present, concentrates on Martha, a neuropsychologist in crisis, who envies her patients’ freedom in being unable to remember their pasts.
Within the three interwoven stories, which bleed into each other both story-wise and physically as the play develops, we meet over 20 characters, all played by just four actors. Handily they are all skilled at accents, which helps us to distinguish between them when all that changes otherwise on the mostly bare stage in the centre of the theatre is a flash of lighting to indicate a new scene. This rapid shifting, as elements come together and move apart, perfectly reflects the ideas of identity the play explores – do we have a single, fixed personality, or are we lots of different things that can change and shift? In trying to grasp the narrative ‘whole’ of the play the audience are the aspect of the brain desperate for a single explanation.
A fantastic piece of emotionally powerful theatre that will keep you thinking for a long time afterwards, Incognito is well worth seeing. Probably twice, in case you miss anything the first time. ★★★★★ Deborah Sims
Presented by nabokov, Live Theatre Newcastle, HighTide Festival Theatre in association with The North Wall.
