Touching the Void

The vertical often gets overlooked in theatre. Tom Morris’ production of Joe Simpson’s 1988 memoir about his against-all-odds survival of a mountaineering accident uses the height of the proscenium to convey a sense of peril, but also isolation.

Simpson was climbing Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes when he fell and broke his leg. After he slid into a deep crevasse, his climbing partner Simon Yates felt his only choice was to leave him so that at least one of them would survive; Simpson then spent three agonising days on his own, dehydrated and wracked with pain, crawling towards base camp.

The production, which opened the renovated Bristol Old Vic in 2018, and comes to the West End after a UK tour, is majestically tense. David Greig’s adaptation solves the issue of how to dramatise something so solitary, by creating a framing device in which Joe’s wake is taking place in a Scottish pub. His sister becomes a kind of spirit guide and inner voice, spurring him on when pain and desperation threaten to overwhelm him, at times literally hitting him with a stick to keep him conscious, while also reflecting on the compulsive mentality of climbers, the way in which some men – it’s usually men – seem driven to risk everything in order to briefly stand atop a peak.

In a similar way, Morris’ production finds inventive solutions to the challenges of staging something so inherently physical. Ti Green’s ingenious set consists of a kind of jagged climbing frame that represents the mountain range but also conveys its texture, its might and its fragility. It’s covered in paper through which the actors thrust their boots and ice axes, as they clamber over its planes. There are nooks in which they can hunker from freezing winds. Behind them everything is black, a terrifying void into which they might so easily tumble.

Josh Williams is solid and likeable as Joe, which is impressive given that he spends much of the production crawling and hobbling around the stage while howling and whimpering. Fiona Hampton does most of the emotional heavy lifting, as his sister, and Patrick McNamee provides some necessary levity as the guitar-playing backpacker Richard, who tags along with Simon and Joe.

If it’s perhaps a little easy to make a woman both the recipient of exposition and an embodiment of Joe’s survival instinct, it also makes for an effective device because Greig’s a skilled writer and Hampton an engaging performer.

Morris’ production layers on the tension impressively in the first half, but the later scenes, in which Joe, at the brink of death, painfully edges his way towards salvation, can’t quite match this heart-in-mouth quality. And there’s nothing in the show that comes close to the hallucinatory feel of Kevin Macdonald’s 2003 documentary. What the production does particularly well, however, is make it possible to appreciate Simon’s horrific predicament in leaving his climbing partner behind while also allowing the audience to marvel at human resilience in the most testing of circumstances.

Touching the Void designer Ti Green: ‘This job is not just choosing the chairs, it’s shaping the narrative’