Something very strange happens to humans when we find ourselves in extremis. As our bodies focus entirely on survival, our minds begin to wander into the recesses of memory and imagination and soon we find ourselves in a place very similar to a dream. What happened to Joe and Simon on Siula Grande is well known. It's been a best-selling book and an award-winning documentary film. Thirty years on, it's been covered in countless articles, essays and news reports. So, in telling the story for the theatre, I wanted to find a different approach. We all know, roughly, what happened on the mountain, but there is another terrain on which Joe's adventure took place, the terrain of the mind, and that was the terrain I wanted to explore in this play. We're all drawn to true stories of survival - like the Thai cave rescue or the Chilean mining accident - because they simultaneously terrify us and make us feel safe. It's terrifying to think of being trapped in a cave; terrifying to think of being trapped inside a glacier with a broken leg. But in the safety of a story we can feel the fear whilst having the space to think: 'If that were me, what would I do? How would I respond? Would I panic? Scream? Would I lay down and die?' In the safety of a story we allow ourselves to go deep into the very darkest places of our imagination, whilst all the time enjoying the knowledge that we, and the hero, will ultimately come back home. Humans have probably told each other survival stories for hundreds of thousands of years. After all, stories like these could save our lives. They pass on skills, information, and ways to approach extreme situations. They prepare us for our own future struggles. This ancient-ness possibly explains why these stories often take on such epic and archetypal forms. Much like the ancient Greek myth of FACT, FICTION AND FANTASIA A NOTE FROM TOUCHING THE VOID WRITER, DAVID GREIG. David Greig (Adaptor) Tom Morris (Director) Orpheus and Eurydice, Touching the Void features one of the oldest and most powerful narrative archetypes - the story of somebody who comes back from the dead. If you went back in time and sat round a campfire in a distant land, with a group of unknown strangers, you could still tell the story of Touching the Void and the shape of the story would draw your listeners in. Of course, survival stories always take place in two distinct worlds - the real world of rocks and bones and blood and cold, and the world of our heads; a world full of ghosts and ancestors and fears and dreams and monsters. Two worlds that could kill us. Two worlds in which we can find, if we are determined, the tools for our survival. But story alone is not enough for the theatre. The stage requires dialogue so, to make our version of story feel animated, Tom and I went back to old forms. We gave Joe a spirit guide. We sent him a friend to voyage in search of him, into the land of the dead, to find him and to help guide him back from the grave. Obviously in real life, that isn't what happened. In real life, Joe was alone, and that loneliness is an important part of the story we're telling. But in the book, Joe talks quite specifically about a voice in his head. He says this voice was very important in helping him survive. That was a key foot placement for Tom and I as we tried to find a way into this story. We thought about Joe's voice and that guided us towards the creation of a new character. Having read all of Joe's books, I was very inspired by This Game of Ghosts (1993), the closest to what you could call his autobiography. In it, there's a very compelling and funny chapter about his childhood relationship with his sister, Sarah. She used to provoke and torment and tease her little brother Joe (as all big sisters, surely, do) and so, it struck us, that perhaps, she was the voice in Joe's head. Sarah and Joe were very close. Sadly she died some years ago and so we knew that, if we were going to commit to this idea, we would need Joe's permission. Fortunately, when we opened up the possibility of this approach, Joe was incredibly generous about it, telling us that Sarah had a wicked sense of humour, that she had enjoyed teasing him about his climbing career and fame, and that she would probably have found it very funny that she ended up featuring in the play. It felt to us that we'd received his blessing. For me, knowing of Joe's real relationship with Sarah added a new layer of depth to this story. Of course, the Sarah who appears in this play is a fiction. She is not intended to be a representation of the real woman in Joe's life. The same is true of the character of Richard. In real life, the boys were accompanied to Siula Grande by backpacker Richard Hawking who also appears briefly in the film. Understandably, Richard values his privacy and finds the Touching the Void industry a little intrusive. With that in mind, we decided to invent a 'Richard' who would best help us to tell the story. Our Richard is a climbing nerd, he's a writer, he's a fan. If he's based on anyone, he's probably based on me. In the rehearsal room Tom kept calling him Richard Greig. For many reasons, I've thrown the word 'fantasia' around when talking about this play. What I mean by that is that we've let the show explore the many worlds, characters and possibilities, which fizz and pop and come alive in our minds when we're fighting for our lives. In extremis we make connections - often when we don't even realise they're there - and it's in this dreamlike state of mind where we find the colour and form, humour and wit, and the delight and strangeness... all the things I most like in a play. There's a phrase in Ultra Running, a sport I particularly like, that goes 'when you think you can't go on, you can do the same amount and half as much again'. That's sort of a base thing about humans. It's like we have a petrol gauge. When the dial hits red, it's built into us that there's a long way further we can go. For me, there's something incredibly powerful about that - our instinctual fight to survive. You need only be involved in a road accident or have a friend, a lover or yourself touched by illness to glimpse this for yourself. When you think you can't go on, you can. The same amount and half as much again. At least. Now, of course, Joe's gauge passed far beyond the red, but you needn't climb a mountain to observe this feeling of surprise at our extraordinary inner strength. It's around us all the time, in our friends, neighbours, parents, children. It's in ourselves.
