Touching the Void: climber Joe Simpson on the ‘feelgood’ show inspired by his survival

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