It’s been a rocky road for Melbourne theatres these last couple of years, so there’s a poetic flourish to MTC reopening the doors at the Southbank Theatre with a true story hung on a Herculean struggle for survival.
Many audience members will come to Touching the Void with some knowledge of the travails of mountaineer Joe Simpson, left for dead in an icy crevasse on the punishing slopes of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. His 1988 memoir of the same name detailed his astonishing fight for survival, after fellow climber Simon Yates lost all hope, cut a rope and let Joe plunge into the icy heart of a glacier with no food or water and a shattered leg.
Adapted into the wildly successful 2003 docudrama of the same name, Scottish playwright David Greig translated it to the stage in 2018, but recreating Joe’s monumental task on stage is no easy ask. Do you strip it right back and rely on stark sound and light design to transport us into this horror, or do you go large and physically recreate the punishing slopes of Siula Grande?
Helmed by MTC associate director Petra Kalive (The Lifespan of a Fact), this production ambitiously opts for the latter while dropping the ball a little on the former. After a briefly thrilling moment of actor Joe Klockek (Boy Swallows Universe) dangling from the heavens as Joe, our attentions are diverted to an imagined wake in a pub with a jukebox somewhat shakily represented in the right-hand corner of the stage.
It’s here we meet Joe’s sister Sarah, as played by Wicked star Lucy Durack. If you’ve ever scratched your head over why anyone would willingly throw themselves into scaling a death trap like this, then her scathingly sweary interrogation of Simon (as played by Kevin Hofbauer, Banquo in MTC’s 2017 production of Macbeth) will tickle you. His (and Joe’s) wishy-washy responses may call to mind another book-to-film-to-stage adaptation entirely, sounding an awful lot like an emaciated Renton’s ‘Choose Life’ speech in Trainspotting.
With Sarah remaining unconvinced, Simon attempts to recreate the buzz for her using a chair perched on a pub table. This simple stagecraft transports us to the production’s centrepiece: set designer Andrew Bailey’s towering recreation of Siula Grande’s peak.
Erected in grey girders, it looks a little like a seismic chart and a whole lot like a collapsed Luna Park. It should be astounding, but in practicality it doesn’t work. Kalive, alongside movement director Xanthe Beesley, clearly put a great deal of effort into trying to capture Joe and Simon’s battle for survival in a kinetic, heart-stopping way, but no doubt a mixture of safety precautions and physical demand strip Hofbauer and Klocek’s awkward, shuffling predicament of peril. Gifted lighting designer Katie Sfetkidis (SS Metaphor) opts for a muted palette at pains not to lean into the icy chill of blue and white, while composer and sound designer Darius Kedros’ work is also oddly muted. It just never feels like you are there.
Hofbauer and Klocek put in likeable enough performances, but they’re undermined by Greig’s stuffy script that never quite grasps at what drives these men. Laden with snowdrifts of daggy humour, it only really works when deploying the abundantly goofy charms of Karl Richmond (The Lifespan of a Fact) as their guitar-playing base camp guard.
Enjoyable enough to intrigue fans of the book or film, Touching the Void, at one hour and forty minutes without interval, does not outstay its welcome, but never quite hangs together either. And that’s a shame, because tackling a behemoth is to be commended in these trying times.