Everest Mallory 24 (With Stanley)’ (Venue 29, until AUG 23rd)

“It’s Andy versus the elements as he showcases the elemental art of storytelling.”

Andy Dickinson returns to EdFringe with his comic creation, Stanley, the plain-spoken everyman eyewitness to history. Last year, we listened in as Stanley recounted his time with Napoleon Bonaparte during the Hundred Days. This year, Stanley’s great-grandson is along on the 1924 Mount Everest expedition – the second British attempt to conquer “the third pole”. Even folks as terrestrial and gradient-averse as this Cambridgeshire fentrotter have heard of how, 101 years ago, Edward Norton set a world altitude record of 8,572.8 metres and how, on the expedition’s third ascent, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared. Did they reach the summit before they perished? Could their still unrecovered Kodak camera contain the final proof that, despite some of the harshest conditions on our homeworld, the highest place on Earth was reached decades before Hillary & Norgay?

An awful lot of art and artistry goes into making something seem artless. Dickinson packs his shows like you’d want to pack for an expedition to the back of beyond. Nothing is coming with us except the most essential. It’s Andy versus the elements as he showcases the elemental art of storytelling. It’s a total and complete contrast to what’s on offer over at Assembly. There, punters can feast their eyes on the sumptuous costumes, sets, and staging of the massively emotive, pansori-style of theatre presented in the Korean season. Andy’s approach is more akin to Roald Amundsen’s straight there and back expedition to the South Pole.

What makes an Andy Dickinson production so memorable is the afterburn. As you walk out of the venue and into your favourite Nepalese restaurant, a flood of flashbacks wash over you, a reminder of just how much unadorned material has been presented in so short a span of time. As you hum and haw over whether to have the Machhako Tarkari or the Chicken Rumjatar (before finally settling, yet again, for the Solukhambu Lamb) it occurs to you that you have been witness to an exceptionally fine and informative presentation. You’ve actually learned a thing or six. Our narrator, Stanley, is put upon, trodden down, and occasionally even sneered at by history’s great and the good whose names we remember. The genius of Stanley is that he goes where no one else can go. He sees, and lives to recount, what few others have such precise knowledge of.

There is less tech in this production. I would like to have seen a side-on elevation explaining just how steep the climb really was, and just how sharply the path between life and death narrowed for the expedition between the Northern (Tibetan) Route’s primary camps – but then I would also like a ski lift. What I like best about Dickinson and Stanley is that they leave the audience entirely free to think and feel what they like. Subjectivity is left at base camp. The emphasis is on how objectively nuts and bonkers the whole premise of the story actually is, especially since it really did happen.

Come for the unadorned but always adorable storytelling. Stay for the inside track on one of the great moments of adventure, danger, and excitement. Get your windproof Burberry cotton smocks on and go see this!