Drama Students Experience 'Touching The Void'

On Wednesday 22 January, Mr Godfrey and Mrs Hughan O’Connell took the Lower Sixth and Upper Sixth drama students to the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, to see the 2.30pm matinee of David Grieg’s stage adaptation of Joe Simpson’s harrowing mountaineering survival memoir, Touching the Void, which they will review for their written exam.

Below you can read Mr Godfrey’s report on their exciting trip to see Touching the Void – which drama staff and students highly recommend watching!

“On our way to the theatre, we all wondered the following before seeing this play: How do you translate something that largely revolves around the visceral horror of a man trying to make his way down a huge mountain, utterly alone, with a broken leg and no food or water with the certainty that he will die; into theatre, a verbal medium?

Well, playwright David Greig and director Tom Morris found a great answer: This play was largely framed as a sort of hallucination inside the mind of Joe, who fell while attempting to scale the 20,814-foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes with his climbing partner Simon Yates in 1985. This device let the playwright bend reality considerably and centralise not Joe (Josh Williams) but his sister Sarah (Fiona Hampton), who’s angry, grief-stricken quest to understand what her brother was playing at made her a manifestation of Joe’s subconscious.

What elevated ‘Touching the Void’ from ‘well-judged’ to, as student Tiggy S (L6) said, ‘spine-tingling’ was Tom Morris’s exemplary staging, in cahoots with a crack creative team headed by designer Ti Green and movement director Sasha Milavic Davies.

Ellie T (U6) said ‘The choreography of the mountain climbing was riveting!’

When we saw Joe and Simon making their ascent, they were on a gargantuan impressionistic edifice that looked a bit like an impossible climbing frame, steep angles draped in ragged patches of white fabric. The actors were crawling and climbing at angles that made us all feel distinctly queasy.

Touching the Void never felt safe or predictable. The students all thought it was white-knuckle theatre, which they will be all be able to write detailed reviews about for their written exam.”