The location is perfect. If, on a clear day, you stand just beyond the Theatre by the Lake’s front door and let your eyes skim south-westwards, across Derwentwater, in the blue distance you might glimpse England’s highest peak, Scafell Pike. Charlie, one of the title’s eponymous climbers, was taken to Scafell on a school trip, aged 16. “On the summit… he’d never felt so alive”, according to Tshering, the guide hired about 20 years later by Charlie and his partner, Yasmin, to lead them up Everest. Only Yasmin and Tshering return.
Carmen Nasr’s disappointing new play promises mystery and suspense but does not deliver. It’s based on dilemmas familiar from the docudrama Touching the Void: how to react when it seems one member of a team might not make it back to base camp; which of two survivors’ versions of events is true? Connie, a private investigator hired by Charlie’s grief-stricken mother, travels to Nepal to confront Yasmin and Tshering. The problem, as Tshering puts it, is that, in Everest’s corpse-strewn, ghost-haunted death zone, “time and space disappear. It can be impossible to remember what happens.”
It can also be impossible to care, as disjointed scenes clunk around past, present and future, bereft of tension. Guy Jones’s directorial pace, at times glacial, lacks dramatic drive. Actors do their best with characters thinner than air at high altitude, but only Shenagh Govan, as Charlie’s mother, manages to convey a sense of inner life.
On a positive note, the production delivers a thrilling opening. Huge, white sheets arranged in triangles suggest a light-drenched, snow-covered mountain range (Max Johns, design; Jess Bernberg, lights). Echoing sound and music (Alexandra Faye Braithwaite) whistle eerie winds. A rope descends from the flies; Yasmin climbs down; stops to stare; the rope snakes and curls; she clings on… blackout! Unfortunately, it peaks too soon; it’s downhill from here on in.
The Climbers is at the Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, until 16 July
