Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2007

Lucy Wills
posted 28 August 2007

Paines Plough’s ‘proper’ play this year – as opposed to the marathon feat that is Ravenhill for Breakfast - is Rona Munro’s Long Time Dead, a four-hander about mountain climbers that offers a meditation on camaraderie, compulsion, bereavement and love.

The problem is that, despite being well-written, excellently performed and brilliantly directed, there is very little about the play which is allowed to remain exciting. It opens with a tense sequence in which two oddly nick-named climbers, Grizzly and Dog, rescue their friend Gnome, who has fallen from the mountain and is bleeding from a head-wound. The actors clamber about the set, or hang, suspended by climbing ropes. The atmosphere and the writing could not be better. The three amuse one another with off-colour jokes and games to distract themselves from their potentially fatal position. This could have been developed into a great hour/hour and a half show, with the cast scaling the whole height of a theatre.

Sadly, all too soon the scene shifts to a London hospital, with the climbers gathered round Gnome’s bed, and the introduction of an unusually flirtatious widowed nurse. The back stories and past lives of the characters gradually emerge through their conversations with one another, and their monologues to their comatose friend.

The various personal demons driving each of the characters are interesting enough, but it is difficult to resist the sense that much the same sort of thing has been seen many times before, not least on Casualty. The writing seems to be content to offer, well-turned, but nonetheless straightforward naturalistic conversations about some ideas about why people do what they do. There are at least unexpected twists and turns. Just when one has concluded that the remainder of the play’s considerable running time will be taken up with hospital drama, the action transfers back to the mountain, with more use of Miriam Buether’s impressive ergonomic white box set. Ultimately, while every element of the play is obviously well done, it is hard to see what the point that the whole is trying to make, or why we are being asked to watch.