Some may presume that catharsis can be found in memoir writing, but for Joe Simpson, putting Touching the Void down on paper was “horrible”. He retreated to a friend’s attic to write the book over seven weeks, purely because the facts of his stricken ascent up Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes as a 25-year-old had been greatly misrepresented through rumours in the climbing world. Now, decades on, he’s flummoxed to see his story as a play, making its Australian premiere in Melbourne on 17 January after receiving five-star reviews in the UK.
“There was obviously something in that story that fascinated everybody,” Simpson says from an attic in the UK, where he’s tearing himself away from the cricket. “It’s not simply rubbernecking. A degree of it is that returning-from-the-dead stuff that’s very much part of the northern hemisphere mythology, from Norse sagas to Jesus Christ. People think, I’m going to get into deep shit someday. I’m going to get cancer, I’m going to lose my job – whatever. What would I do in that situation?”
In 1985, Simpson and fellow climber Simon Yates decided to tackle the previously unclimbed West Face. After a series of calamities, Simpson fell from an ice cliff, breaking his leg. Yates laboriously tried to lower him to safety, successfully clearing 3,000 feet, but as storm conditions worsened, the pair became stuck, with Yates in danger of being pulled from the cliff. He made the call to cut the rope, which meant Simpson, who Yates was unable to see or communicate with, would fall. “Left for dead” is the way the scenario is often described.
“Eventually there was nothing in the story that you could recognise except the cutting of the rope,” Simpson says of those distortions. “My peers – people who should know better – were making judgment calls on what Simon had done without actually knowing any of the facts.”
Back in 1988, Simpson expected to sell around 500 copies of Touching the Void within the climbing world, but he’s shifted more than 1m. In 2003, a Bafta-winning docudrama of the same name reconstructed the action and became the most successful documentary in British cinema history. Then in 2018, the book was adapted for the stage by Scottish playwright David Greig. Now the Melbourne Theatre Company has taken on that script, with Petra Kalive as associate director.
“David was able to balance the story, so we get Joe’s epic hero’s journey, but also Simon’s journey. They were both in an impossible position and they’re both heroes in their own right, but their trajectories are very different,” says Kalive.
Yates approves of play. “It’s a feelgood story,” he told PA Media after seeing the UK production. “It all works out in the end. I think we were very lucky. We got away with it.”
The titular void becomes a character in its own right, as well as a metaphor for death. “That feels right for this production, especially doing it at this time,” Kalive says. “I thought a play about endurance and hope would be good when we programmed it, but had no idea that it would have so many resonances now.”
Set designer Andrew Bailey created a mountain-like structure that’s “abstract” but requires the actors to work at height. There were five weeks of rehearsal, which included rock-wall climbing in the CBD. Kevin Hofbauer, who plays Simpson, used to be an athlete, which helps; Joe Klocek, equally athletic, plays Yates. And Karl Richmond plays Richard Hawking, a non-climbing backpacker who looked after base camp, for comic relief.
And then there’s Sarah, played by Lucy Durack. She’s Simpson’s sister, used as a device to provoke her brother in his darkest hour and explore the many moral challenges of mountaineering.
There’s a moment at Simpson’s fictional funeral when Sarah delivers a line that taps into the perception that mountaineering is a selfish pursuit, chief among the reasons being that some mountaineers put reaching the summit above human life: “I lost my moral compass. Do you happen to have one? Oh no, you’re a climber.”
Simpson has now written five non-fiction books and two novels that all explore the ethics of climbing; none more so than 1997’s Dark Shadows Falling, triggered by an incident a year earlier in which two Japanese climbers allegedly failed to help an Indian climber whose body remains on Everest to this day.
“One of the climbers said there is no morality above 1,000 metres and I got absolutely bloody livid at that,” Simpson says. “There’s no way a summit is more important. The very least you do is you sit with that man and you hold his hand and you give him water.”
He’s also disturbed by the environmental impact of hundreds of people at a time at base camp, putting their bucket-list dreams of conquering Everest above exploring the area in a sustainable way.
“I don’t regard what’s going on at Everest as mountaineering, frankly,” he says. “You know – 600 people climbing up a rope that somebody else put in, breathing oxygen that somebody else carried up … There are climbers today like we were in 1982, trying to do the hardest things you possibly can in the best style, trying to climb to the aestheticism of the line.”
In his book This Game of Ghosts, Simpson touches on childhood and what might have set him on his course. Now, he says, “I think being sent away to school at eight has a fairly major effect on your personality. Suddenly torn away from your parents. Maybe it enables you to be more independent.”
When he was 15 he rejected Roman Catholic indoctrination, but although he lost his faith, he found a sense of spirituality in mountaineering that gave the pursuit great meaning. “You can put your head down to sleep and see fossils in the stone that you’re lying on,” he says. “And you can look up – the starlight is just extraordinary, especially at high altitude. You’re looking at light coming from stars that stopped existing 100,000 years ago. That kind of spirituality is your part of being Gaia.”
Simpson continued climbing until 2009, at which point he was in so much pain descending from a summit in Nepal that he realised all the “cheques I cashed in my 20s had come through”. As he says, there are old climbers and bold climbers, but no old, bold climbers. These days he is a keen fly-fisher (“not quite the same”) but the grief of losing climbing took five years to get over.
“It’s how you define yourself,” he says. “Every year you’re going away on a trip and it was that sort of steamboat whistle – the aircraft is going down the runway and you’re going off on a great adventure, thinking, ‘What’s going to happen this time?’”
Touching the Void is on 17 January to 19 February at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner.
