What sense could he make now of this game of ghosts that had claimed the lives of so many of his friends over the years he had been climbing, while he had survived so many events that should have meant certain death? In an attempt to find catharsis for his confused emotions he wrote this e xtraordinary memoir, revealing his early ife and his fifteen years of climbing on three continents, before and after the life-changing experience of Siula Grande. On his descent he heard that a young, first-time climber had been killed by a chance rockfall. He felt forced to test his nerve again, and struggled on crutches to 20,000 feet on Pumori, near Everest. Next, another fall in the Himalaya crippled and almost broke him. That meant dragging the terrifying experience out of the deeper shadows of his memory. The first test was to write his award-winning account of the ordeal in Touching the Void. He did not expect to live it all over again - more than once. That Simpson survived his experience on Peru's Siula Grande is a revelation of the power of the human spirit to overcome fear, pain and deprivation of almost unimaginable intensity. When mountain climber Simon Yates cut the rope and sent his friend and climbing partner Joe Simpson plummeting to an ordeal few mountaineers can have contemplated, the outcome was totally unpredictable. David Greig's Touching the Void premiered at Bristol Old Vic, Bristol in September 2018. Tense, funny and inquisitive, Touching the Void explores the mind's extraordinarily rich reservoirs of strength and imagination when teetering on the edge of death. We discover the counter-cultural world of Alpine climbing and the sensual joy of the mountains we bear witness to the appalling moment when Joe's climbing partner Simon Yates, battered by freezing winds and tethered to the injured Simpson, makes the critical decision to cut the rope. Adapted for the stage by David Greig, Joe's story explodes into a bold theatrical fantasia. Mallory said, 'Because it's there.' Joe Simpson's memoir Touching the Void, international bestseller and BAFTA-winning film, charts his struggle for survival on the perilous Siula Grande mountain in the Peruvian Andes aged twenty-five. In 1928 a journalist asked George Mallory why he wanted to climb Everest.