A white-knuckle adaptation to take you to the top of the world
Touching the Void
Duke of York’s ★★★★★
You’re alone, lost and in agony, high in the Peruvian Andes. At 19,000 feet, descending from the summit of Siula Grande, you slipped, breaking your leg and smashing your ankle. Now, following a brave but botched bid to lower you to safety, your climbing partner has had to cut the rope holding you together, causing you to plummet into a crevasse where you lie in darkness, without food and water, hands frostbitten, the wind chill taking the cold to -50C (-58F).
Do you a) give up and make your peace with death? Or b) make every effort, no matter the excruciating pain and apparent futility, to find some way back to base camp, miles away? The answer is that you opt for the impossible. And you pull through after incredible Herculean efforts.
Is that a spoiler? No. We know full well that the climber – Joe Simpson – lived to tell the tale. He published it. Touching the Void hit the bestseller lists (in 1988) and was a Bafta-winning documentary film (in 2003). The remarkable thing about David Greig’s adaptation – first seen at the Bristol Old Vic last autumn – is that this is immaterial: the ordeal is relayed with such a sure-footed sense of pace, suspense and adrenalised anguish that nothing feels certain until the end.
“There are many ways to die in the mountains,” wrote the academic Robert Macfarlane in his breathtaking book Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003). The beauty of Greig’s account is that it grapples with the risk-embracing mindset of intrepid explorers as much as it contemplates the instincts that sustain humans – all animals – on the brink of death.
Swiftly, the natural fear about a show of this kind – that it will celebrate rugged machismo with a sort of grunting Top Gear-ish blokeyness
If anything, the cosiness of a West End theatre accentuates the contrasts
– is dispelled. This is a spellbinding evening that thrives on overturning assumptions, in line with the mountaineer’s perspective that scoffs at the madness of living a normal life. Greig – assisted by the resourcefulness of director Tom Morris and his team (harnessing, too, the audience’s capacity to suspend disbelief) – uses narrative daring and detached humour to take us to the top of the world.
We loop back and forth in time – as if in a hallucinogenic fever – from the starting-point of Simpson’s plunge.
Unpredictable lighting-cues and snow flurries bolt us from places of warm safety (most notably the Clachaig Inn, Glencoe, where tables and chairs niftily stand-in as mountainsides and moraines and a jukebox pumps out an energising playlist) to the abyss: Ti Green’s set spins a skeletal, climbable shard, decked in frayed, easily ripped paper, in a black void. If anything, the cosiness of a West End theatre accentuates the contrasts, and there’s an exhilarating moment early on when Jo’s sister, Sarah (Fiona Hampton), scales the side of the auditorium – one of a number of simple coups de théâtre that help make your head spin.
In a fictional sleight of hand, Sarah is shown in grief, holding to account, as at a wake, Simpson’s fellow climber Simon (Angus Yellowlees, physically capable, with lurking hints of culpability) and camp minder Richard (sweetly played by Patrick Mcnamee as a wide-eyed rookie). The internal and external blur: she becomes her stricken brother’s guide, willing him on – and like her, we become invested with every inching step Josh Williams’s howling Joe takes. Little else needs be added except that it beats most action films this year. I’ve seen it twice and would go again in a heartbeat.
Until Feb 29. Tickets: 0844 871 7623; touchingthevoidplay.com