What did you dream of being when you were younger? Would the five-year-old you recognise the 35-year-old you? What about that career as a professional snorkeller? Didn’t you fancy a job as a spy?
Previous immersive pieces by the much talked about theatre collective Non Zero One have ranged across territory as varied as water polo, neuroscience and the nature of serendipity. Now they’re on to the big one: the journey of life. As before, we’re issued with headphones, this time accompanied by a notebook and a torch. We seem to be on a motorway; the biscuits-and-cocoa voice of a late-night DJ coos in our ears. Do we want to take the exit up into the hills, or carry straight on? Are we even making a choice, or has someone else already decided for us?
Experienced through video art, sound installation and audience interaction, Mountaineering wants to take us places: framed as an odyssey into the things that make us who we are, it is somewhere between solo reverie and group therapy. Whether you find this captivating or cringeworthy might depend on your willingness to share secrets about yourself with strangers, and your ability to displace cynicism for a state of childlike wonder (a sermon about life choices conducted via the metaphor of crisp flavours didn’t quite do it for me).
There are perhaps too many elements; and, for once, it feels as if the theatre-makers could be more inventive with technology. But at its best, Mountaineering has an attentive, thoughtful intensity that honours its subject matter. One of the stories it tells is of Pat, who, following the death of her husband and the flooding of her house, throws it all in and decamps to harvest vines with a Portuguese lover. It’s never too late to change direction.
• Until 15 February. Box office: 0300 6789 222. Venue: Roundhouse, London. At Salisbury Playhouse 5-7 March. Box office: 01722 320 333.
