Touching the Void
An agonisingly powerful premiere
Touching the Void Bristol Old Vic ★★★★★
It feels wonderfully apt that the Bristol Old Vic is reopening – at the end of a £26 million renovation project – with a world premiere theatrical adaptation of Joe Simpson’s mountaineering memoir Touching the Void. Simpson’s 1988 bestseller – detailing a near fatal climbing expedition in the Peruvian Andes three years earlier – relayed one of the most remarkable stories of endurance and survival in climbing history. And you could say that the Old Vic has battled overwhelming odds to remain the oldest continually working theatre in the English-speaking world. A decade ago, it was touch and go; the building looked tired, the direction of travel was uncertain. Step by step, phase by phase, a hobbled regional player has been given exactly the right shot in the arm to recover and move forwards.
It might sound far-fetched to hail the BOV as an Everest of an arts venue, but architects Haworth Tompkins – the go-to people for theatre-building magic – have created a sense of the sublime in the piazza-like new foyer (which opens on Monday). For the first time since it opened, in 1766, the public can now see the façade of the Georgian theatre (the Theatre Royal) from the street. It wasn’t externally ornate – the auditorium façade is a mighty wall of brick. But it has its own wow factor.
And, just as the architects have uncovered the soul of the building, so its artistic director Tom Morris’s most accomplished project since War Horse (2007) takes you inside the agony and the ecstasy of Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates’s successful ascent and disastrous descent of the Siula Grande – but mainly the agony. When Simpson fell down the North Ridge, shattering a leg, he became, in climbing terms, “basically a dead man”.
At 19,000ft, with no chance of rescue and “a yawning void” waiting to devour them, they soldiered on. But things went from bad to horrific. Yates finally made the heart-stopping decision to sever the rope connecting them, leaving his stricken pal marooned inside a crevasse. By luck and incredible pluck, Simpson found his way out, dragging, hopping, yelping across treacherous terrain, arriving – near-dead – at base camp just as Yates was poised to leave.
We know the outcome, yet that doesn’t matter a jot as we watch, because it was never certain. The creative team put us in Simpson’s frozen shoes, winching us down into the nightmare. When, at the start, we hear from Joe’s aggrieved sister Sarah at an imagined wake, bitterly quizzing Edward Hayter’s Simon, it’s as though adapter David Greig is groping for a firm handle on the subject. But he knows exactly what he’s doing. Reframing the third man in the expedition, camp-minder Richard Hawking (played by Patrick Mcnamee), as a comically enraptured schoolboy romantic, he presses home the point that this extraordinary adventure was about what was going on in the men’s minds. No film footage is required, unlike in the 2003 documentary.
Our imaginations are harnessed by sound effects and physicality that’s both pretend-effortful and also gruelling (the dominant design feature is a shard-like climbing-frame, dangling in blackness). Sarah (a caustic, inquisitive Fiona Hampton) enters the deteriorating mental landscape of Josh Williams’s rugged, dogged Joe, urging him on with icy resolve, a psychological Sherpa.
After two nail-biting hours, you feel as if you’ve been to the ends of the Earth without moving from your seat, experiencing the in-extremis odyssey inch by howling inch. What more stirring testament to human fortitude and the power of theatre could there be? The message for Bristol? That the only way is up.