ARTS: Globalisation and the connections between cultures and individuals are reflected in one remarkable theatre production, writes Karen Fricker

As the contemporary world grows smaller, its theatre grows more international. The drive towards interculturalism - the use by theatre artists of elements from cultures other than their own in theatre productions - was arguably the defining characteristic of the last 30 years of theatre practice, a line whose roots we can trace back to Brecht and Artaud's fascination with Asian theatre traditions, and follow though Peter Brook and Ariane Mnoushkine's experiments with Indian theatre, to Andrew Lloyd Webber bringing Bollywood to the West End in the current hit musical Bombay Dreams.

As the century turned, however, discourse in the world of politics and economics turned from discussions of internationalisation to globalisation: travel, trade, communications, political agreement, and political incursion have brought cultures into closer contact than ever before, and the challenge now is to create strategies to deal with this increased connectivity. While many in the developed world celebrate this progress - the ease of travel and the access to communication and information it brings - at the same time, the divide between the developed and undeveloped world grows more gaping: half the people in the world, for example, have never made a phone call.

How will this new connectivity, and its challenges, be expressed through theatre? It's surely too early to name any new movements definitively, but if we had to vote on a production that ushered the era of globalisation (warts and all) into theatre, my nomination would be Mnemonic, by the London-based ensemble Complicite.

Irish audiences know Complicite's work well: the presentation of their haunting devised work The Street of Crocodiles in the 1994 Dublin Theatre Festival was hugely well received (and made a visible impact on Irish theatre practice), while their odd meditation on plague-ridden rabbits, Light, in the 2000 DTF proved that even highly-acclaimed 20-year-old companies were not afraid of risking failure through experimentation.

First staged in 1999 as a co-production with the Salzburg Festival, Mnemonic hasn't played in Ireland yet, but the rapturous reception it received on its recent run at London's Riverside Studios would seem to indicate that there might still be more life (and more tours) in the work yet. It was sold out, with queues out the door at every performance, and the critical reaction it inspired was of an unusual intensity: "I think about the world differently now than when I entered the theatre, and I know I shall remember Mnemonic all my life," wrote the Guardian's Lyn Gardner. Time Out's Brian Logan, for his part, promoted the production to deity status: "Like God, but better, Mnemonic holds the whole world in its hands."

What can possibly make Mnemonic so special? To my eye, it's the way it represents connectedness: the show's subject is the link between the individual and the global, the relationship of every person to his or her past and to every other person who ever lived. And rather than expressing these connections in a distanced, presentational kind of way, Mnemonic gets personal: Complicite goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure that each audience member can relate their own experience to the ideas being presented on stage.

On a plot level, Mnemonic tells two interweaving stories: one of a young woman, Alice (played by the Northern Irish actress Susan Lynch, who won an IFTA last week for Any Time Now), who deserts her boyfriend, Virgil, after her mother's death and journeys around Europe looking for the father she never met; and the other of the true-life discovery, in 1991, of the "Ice Man", a 5,000-year-old corpse frozen in the Alps.

But before these stories start to unfold, Complicite starts to draw the audience into the experience: while the house lights are still up, the company's artistic director Simon McBurney appears on stage and delivers a seemingly rambly (but actually tightly scripted) discussion of memory, identity, love, and loss. This prologue ends with each audience member putting on an eye mask and holding a leaf, while McBurney asks them to think of their parents, and then their parents standing behind them, and so on until he concludes that the line of human connection is longer than the number of people who have ever lived, and thus "you are related to every person in the room".

This notion of interrelation is driven home through every aspect of the production. McBurney draws the two plots together by playing both Virgil and the corpse of the Ice Man. The full cast of seven is nearly always on stage and constantly in motion; the integration of spoken dialogue and elegant movement that expands on and reinforces the production's ideas is Complicite's trademark. Stories interweave and jump back and forth in time, and there are no scene breaks: actors whisk plastic curtains across the stage, accompanied by music and sound effects, to change location and time. The performers' virtuosity is highlighted: over half a dozen languages are spoken, from Greek to Polish to Russian to French, with actors switching language and character constantly and with seeming effortlessness.

On plot level, Mnemonic's stories end indeterminately: we are never sure if Alice finds her father, and while the story that is constructed to explain the Ice Man's fate - he fled up a mountain to escape a massacre in his village - sounds plausible, the point is that we can never definitively know what happened to him. But if there is one message that Complicite seem determined to drive home it's that we are all members of the family of man: an idea launched by the audience interaction at the start and reinforced by a final montage, as each member of the cast in turn replaces the Ice Man on his display table as part of a swirling, circular procession.

Scholarly response to Mnemonic has already started to unpack the selectivity and exclusion of the show's vision of togetherness: the fact that the entire cast is European; the assumption of a Western "happy family" model behind the opening exhortation to imagine our parents; the reliance on cultural stereotype in the show's representation of nationalities. The production's politics do seem purposely vague: while it toys with serious geopolitical issues like mass migrations and cultural imperialism, it always ends up retreating back into its assertions of shared humanity.

The basis of the world-view which Mnemonic expresses is nothing new: the notion of a shared humanity has been a theme of art and philosophy since the Renaissance, and underlies many of the foundational institutions of Western society. But defining contemporary global responsibilities to that shared humanity is arguably one of the greatest challenges the world currently faces. Assuming kinship with the rest of mankind is what motivates the progressive contemporary humanism of organisations like Amnesty and the human rights movement; it is also wielded as a rationale behind the foreign policy of imperialist nations, most spectacularly now in the global incursions of the United States.

Not everyone will agree that Mnemonic's instinct to draw together and to unify is politically useful at this stage in world history: understanding what keeps the world apart - the instinct towards racial hatred and war - may be a more essential task at this stage than reminding us we're all the same. Its reminders are certainly privileged and distanced: One wonders how the show would play in Tel Aviv or Baghdad. But the spirit behind the attempt, and the passion with which Mnemonic's reassuring message has been received, is significant. One suspects it is among the first of many grapplings we can expect to see on our stages with the often baffling reality of our increased connectivity to the rest of the planet.