Long Time Dead

Climbers try to free themselves from the wreckage of past tragedies with good doses of humour and human feeling

Review by Joe Vester | 08 Aug 2007

It must be tempting to write a play about climbing where two characters sit on a mountain debating the ethics of leaving someone halfway up a rockface. One can just imagine the blurb: "a taut two-hander showing friends torn between their own safety and loyalty to each other."

Happily, Long Time Dead avoids being a dreary, plotless epic. Yes, people fall off – it's climbing, after all – but ethics are not the focus. Instead, climbing is used as a wall to which the tangled ivy of human relationships cling. Going up moutains and dangling above abysses binds the characters to one another, and gives a context for them to make choices about their lives and their actions.

Above all, this is a play about the past, how it hangs over us, and whether people can pull themselves from the wreckage of their tragedies. Grizzly, an aging climber, cannot rid himself of the memory of his brother who died climbing. Dog, Grizzly's climbing partner, cannot lose his jealousy of the dead brother who will always mean more to Grizzly than he will. A widowed nurse will not let her grief and her love be shrivelled up into mere "getting over it." All of them have to choose whether they will be tied forever to an accident that changed their lives, or whether they can change their lives again for the better.

The setting is astonishing. The characters spend much of the play hanging from ropes, strapping themselves onto the walls, lithely moving above the stage, so that one forgets that they are not frail dots moving across the vastness of snow and rock. Everything on stage is white, tainted only with slowly changing lighting, so that the characters are constantly in a slightly hostile, arid environment, even more so when they are in hospital than when on the hills.

Rona Munro's play is on the whole excellent, and the lively vulgar banter between Dog and Grizzly is just as funny as spending a night in the pub with your mates. Their relationship with the younger climber partner Naomi, aka Gnome, is both devotedly paternal and playfully sexual. One or two lines fall a little flat, and when Grizzly has a sudden outburst of superstition it is hard to be wholly convinced. But the acting is excellent, the ideas are meaningful but not overblown, and quibbling with tiny faults would be churlish.