Everest Mallory 24 (With Stanley)

Aug 23 2025 | By Julia Amour More

★★☆☆☆ Rushed

Paradise in the Vault (Venue 29): Sat 2 – Sat 23 Aug 2025
Review by Julia Amour

Everest Mallory 24 (With Stanley) – Andy Dickinson’s one-man show at Paradise in the Vaults from 2-23 August – mixes the droll storytelling tradition of Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns with an Everyman take on the heroism and recklessness behind the failed expedition.

Incorporating a wealth of quirky historical detail, Dickinson’s fresh perspective as writer and performer marvels at near-superhuman feats at the same time as alluding to early twentieth century types of ‘toxic masculinity’. However, the work’s successes are undermined by sometimes packing too much in and sometimes leaving too much out, putting a more effective show tantalisingly just out of reach.

Andy Dickinson in Everest Mallory 24 (With Stanley). Pic: Chantal Guevara

Dickinson’s fictional Everyman narrator is Stanley, who has been roped in to accompany the 1924 Everest expedition despite barely having been further than the Peak District.

This might seem like an absurdist trope too far, unless you already know that Sandy Irvine – the second British climber who died on the mountain with Mallory – was an inexperienced student with little track record at high altitude, who was invited to join the team as an ‘experiment’.

This fact is only revealed at the very end, however; and the reliance on in-jokes like this limits the appeal of the show. Mountain buffs are clearly a core audience, but the approach unnecessarily excludes the possibility of wider interest. A brief early scene introducing key members of the expedition would be a big enhancement, rather than simply rattling through names with no context or characterisation.

clever twist

In a clever twist, Stanley himself is an ordinary bloke from the Mad Hatter’s town of Stockport. This could explain his tall tales as a side-effect of mercury poisoning from the hat industry, and also hints at the potential for young men’s lives to be nasty, brutish and short no matter whether they stayed put or went off adventuring.

There is a sense of unspoken allusion to the First World War too, only six years earlier, with its legacy of traumatic times when men had to try and learn to hold their lives lightly. The storytelling is at its most thought-provoking when contrasting the stiff-upper-lip heroism of the ‘officer class’ explorers with the unsung dedication of foot-soldiers like the fictional Stanley or the very real Nepalese porters, two of whom also lost their lives on the expedition.

Andy Dickinson in Everest Mallory 24 (With Stanley). Pic: Chantal Guevara.

The writing entertainingly recalls a lineage of eccentric English storytelling, from 1950s cult parody The Ascent of Rum Doodle to the BBC radio plays of Peter Tinniswood and Vivian Stanshall. Music hall and variety traditions are also reference points: but the principal difficulty with the performance (thankfully easily resolvable) is that delivery is so rushed throughout as to be partly unintelligible, meaning that many mordantly witty lines simply don’t land.

Dominic Brennan creates a spare but effective soundscape, marking different chapters of the story with piano refrains or the noises of a mountain storm, and this is matched by a lighting palette of rosy dawns and icy blues. Stanley’s costume, by Polly Rose Morris, is endearingly and appropriately tweedy right down to the gaiters.

fascinating journey

The staging doesn’t need to be complex – but the one archive photograph of Mallory and Irvine shown on-screen at the very end does make it clear how much visual richness might have been added by using such period materials throughout the show, as Dickinson traces the expedition’s fascinating journey by ship to India, by train to Darjeeling, and on ponies to the Himalayas.

Beyond its current limitations, the work has every potential to convey the full romance, ambition and hubris of this epic story. As it stands – possibly largely due to the fatigue of a long run – it feels frustratingly off peak.

Running time: 55 minutes (no interval).
Paradise in the Vault (The Vault), 11 Merchant Street EH1 2QD (Venue 29).
Saturday 2 – Saturday 23 August 2025.
Daily (Not Suns 10 & 17): 7.15pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
Book here on EdFest.com.*