The theatre is a blinding, dazzling white. Around the edges of the empty space, the detritus of a climbing expedition. In the centre, a discarded camera, a snapped rope and the outline of a prone body, just like you get in a murder investigation.
Judith Adams's Queuing for Everest, a text, not a well-made play - the bleached bones of something that has been fleshed out by director, designer, lighting, actors and choreographer - is an investigation too. It pieces together our fascination with the highest place on earth, the unending romance of that Sir Galahad of the mountains, George Mallory, the thrill of body and rock hugging each other, the nature of truth, and the way you sometimes have to climb up very high to get a good view of your own life.
Far too much, really. But you can't mock such ambition. This is not the kind of theatre you see often in the regions. It's not playing anything safe, and you can't go up the mountain without taking some risks. Adams and director Deborah Paige know that. For the audiences at stage level, there aren't even any seats. You must find your own perch.
It's a funny thing about mountains. You go up to get away from everything and find yourself surrounded by people. Think of those pictures of the disastrous 1996 season when a queue formed at the Hilary Step, as if they were waiting for a bus. For every six who go up, one doesn't come down. Everest is littered with broken dreams, dead bodies and ghosts.
The ghosts walk here and, somehow, they are much more interesting than Thea and Georges, adulterous lovers on an adventure of a lifetime. Maybe it's because you can't feel much sympathy for rich westerners who pay $64,000 to be dragged up the mountain by a poor sherpa. Maybe it's because Thea's deathless prose makes her an unlikely journalist or that Georges is so irritatingly self-obsessed. Adams lets them make mountains out of molehills. Much more resonant is the character of Georges's wife, Sophie, left behind, like Mallory's wife, and making a painful, stumbling journey in the foothills of her own anxieties.
This play is like a frayed rope. The threads of its different stories, of past and present, documentary and fiction, and its variety of styles never quite come together. It feels like a series of moments, not a seamless whole. Like its characters, it is often too self-conscious. But it's insightful too, at times capturing the beauty and brutality of the mountains and those who climb them, and the hallucinatory madness of risking all and heading into thin air.
Until April 8. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
