Great escape can’t quite hit the heights
Touching The Void (Bristol Old Vic and touring) Verdict: Fascinating but flawed ★★★✩✩ Still Alice (Richmond Theatre and touring) Verdict: Small but powerful ★★★★✩
JOE SIMPSON pulled off one of the great escapes in mountaineering. in 1985, he and climbing partner Simon Yates were descending a peak in the Andes when Simpson broke his leg. The men found themselves on a vast, vertical cliff in terrible weather.
Yates made valiant efforts to help Simpson down, but they encountered further, seemingly insuperable, problems that left Yates with no alternative but to cut a rope from which Simpson had been dangling for hours.
Just when it seemed things could not get any worse, Simpson then found himself stuck in a crevasse. His account of how he crawled miles back to civilisation was told in his book, Touching The Void.
now Bristol Old Vic has collaborated with sister theatres in northampton and Edinburgh to adapt this tale of derring-do.
it makes for an interesting artistic challenge (how do you show mountaineering on a stage?), but is a tad unsatisfying.
playwright David Greig opens with an imagined wake for Joe Simpson. This proves a laborious construct, made worse by coarse language from his sister, Sarah (a too-pushy Fiona Hampton).
There is a good passage when Simon explains the appeal of mountaineering — the thrill of finding finger grips and toeholds.
Scenes on the mountain are done with the aid of a suspended, white-papered climbing frame. Director Tom morris shows us a backdrop of the Andes peak only at the end. pity. more of that sort of photography would have made some repetitive, confusing scenes more palatable. Some shouting over wind noise is not audible.
AS A welcome balance to miss Hampton’s overacting, patrick mcnamee plays a young English backpacker, Richard, who acted as the climbers’ base-camp man. Edward Hayter’s Simon comes across as a decent hunk.
The oddity is Joe himself (Josh Williams). We are told what pop songs he likes and what he intends to eat if he survives. He says the F-word a good 30 times.
But was that really the limit of it? no thoughts of God? no reflections on cruel fate? no regrets, no self-pity, no fear?
There is an early hint of Joe as a bookish man, but it is cut lamentably short. The real void here may be playwright Greig’s script.
OnE test of theatre comes at the curtain call: is it a jolt to see the actors as themselves, out of character? if so, the play has demonstrably transported you.
When Sharon Small took her bows for Still Alice in Richmond on Tuesday night, i felt a wave of relief to see she was OK.
So persuasive was she as Alice — a professor with early- onset Alzheimer’s — and so emotionally engrossing this short but powerful production, it came almost as a surprise to see its star smiling.
it’s been a big success in America, had its British premiere in Leeds and is now on tour. Those who have known dementia may find it both draining and uplifting. miss Small’s performance is subtle enough to make Alice’s progressive memory losses and inner crises seamless. She does this without histrionics — and with shafts of humour.
This is a deceptively potent show, with touching stuff about parenthood and marriage, too.
martin marquez plays Alice’s husband and Ruth Ollman shows touches of lovely sensitivity as daughter Lydia.
it felt a privilege to be there on the same night as members of the Alzheimer’s Society.