THE GREAT ESCAPE
... complete with the chills and spills of a cliffhanger in the Andes
Touching The Void (Duke of York’s, London)
Verdict: Visually impressive theatrical adventure ★★★★✩
LeT’S be absolutely clear: to my mind, mountaineering is incomprehensible and reprehensibly pointless. I find it bad enough going up the London eye, let alone scaling an icy rock face.
But none of that stopped me from thoroughly enjoying this staging of Joe Simpson’s bestselling book about how, in 1985, he found himself crawling down a Peruvian mountainside, with a broken leg and shattered ankle, after his climbing buddy cut the rope binding them together to save himself — leaving Joe for dead.
Interestingly enough my climbing mate Paul was less indulgent than me. I’d brought him along as a consultant, and he was able to offer his comparatively trivial experience of waking up in a freezing river in the Alps at 4am. But Paul felt the staging made light of the serious business of getting yourself into a life-threatening fix.
he was also irritated by the plot device of holding a wake for Simpson, at the Clachaig Inn in Glencoe. OK, so it was a fake wake (we all know Simpson survived). But I was rather impressed by the stagecraft of Tom Morris’s gaunt production; and by how Ti Green recreated the Andes using props from the highland hostelry where the made-up memorial was held.
Actors climb over tables and chairs with a glass gents’ loo sign acting as the treacherous glacier that leads to the shard of white rigging covered in tattered paper that serves as Siula Grande’s pitiless summit.
Movement director Sasha Milavic Davies then ingeniously shifts perspective from vertical to horizontal on the perilous escapade. I was also amused by the tense music, in the style of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
For the book’s adaptor, David Greig, who is himself an extreme fell-runner, the story is a mystical journey into the heart of human experience.
his big dramatic device is to have Joe tormented and driven on by his sister Sarah, who appears in his agonised hallucinations and refuses to let him die. Played with plucky bounce and effing and blinding verve by Fiona hampton, she is not a very sympathetic character.
This is made worse by Greig’s leadenly four-letter script, which reaches its own nadir in the line ‘some of these icicles are **** ing big’. Shakespeare it’s not.
WhAT it is, though, is a thrillingly original spectacle that’s also highly informative about ‘Alpine-style’ mountaineering, in which climbers carry very little. It’s like riding a highperformance motorbike on black ice wearing only underpants.
If you’re looking for psychological complexity, you’re in the wrong theatre. even Angus Yellowlees, as Joe’s climbing companion Simon, admits he doesn’t really know Joe. And this from the man who spent a lot of time cowering with him in tiny tents and icy foxholes, before cutting the rope that held Simpson dangling over a crevasse.
As Joe, Josh Williams puts in a faultless display of screaming and writhing as he drags himself out of danger and into his lucrative future as a writer and motivational speaker. But we don’t get to know him in any meaningful way.
If it’s characters you want, Patrick Mcnamee is your man as the imaginary nerdy novelist who looked after Joe and Simon’s base camp.
Otherwise, this is basically one long theatrical cliffhanger that could probably do without the interval which serves only to break the tension by releasing you into a snug bar, to drink cold beer.
Mind you, that is every inch as close as I want to get to this kind of extreme experience. It’s good to know there are people out there, doing it for you.