There's a moment towards the end of Rona Munro's play about people pushing themselves to the brink of death in order to remind themselves they're alive, when a group of climbers is gathered around the hospital bed of their recovering leader, Grizzly. They've been hailed as heroes in the papers following their ascent, and Grizzly asks his young female charge Gnome if they made it on to the television news. "Course not," she replies. "Nobody died."
Which is the crux of Munro's exploration of the extremes sometimes needed to lay old ghosts to rest.
As the play flits between the halfway-house of a hospital ward and a mountainside no-man's-land, Grizzly forms a bond with a widowed nurse while watching over an injured Gnome, and becomes ever more determined to revisit the mountain where he lost his brother 13 years previously.
Roxanna Silbert's co-production between Paines Plough and The Drum Theatre, Plymouth, renders the play's plea for life larger than it possibly deserves. Miriam Buether's set is as dazzling as Chahine Yavroyan's gorgeous lighting, and the performances, particularly by Garry Cooper as the quietly obsessed Grizzly, are possessed with an infectious warmth beyond their surface grit. The symbolism of the quest is as recognisable as any of several climbing-based plays that have appeared over the past few years.
Within this framework, though, Munro has served up a slice of real humanity with all its flaws intact en route to healing.
