Twelve

Extracurricular activities in secondary schools in the village of Namche, at the foot of Mount Everest, begin in October, a few weeks after the start of the regular school year. Such that the young Sherpa has been taking the theatre workshop for seven and a half months. Although – strictly speaking – we would have to subtract from that count the twenty-one days that he’s been on this expedition, and the five weeks of a previous ascent. It should be understood that climbing licences are a common phenomenon in the Nepalese school system: the Ministry of Education periodically prints supplements so that students who earn their keep as mountain guides can catch up with their classmates. That isn’t the young Sherpa’s problem. He has accumulated more than enough academic merit to resolve the curriculum without impediment. His concern is something else: the annual objective of the theatre workshop.

Perhaps presumptuous, perhaps excessive, the plan is to stage a version of Julius Caesar in the third week of June. The original work, which was written by Shakespeare in the final year – it is believed – of the sixteenth century, requires the participation of over two score performers. More modestly, the drama teacher at the Namche public high school has improvised an adaptation that can be staged with the limited human resources available: the seventeen students in the class. The solutions the teacher has come up with are partly dramaturgic and partly demographic. On one hand, numerous characters’ lines have been absorbed by other characters. On the other, almost everyone has to play more than one role over the course of the performance.

Memorising the lines of two or even three different characters is no small feat for a teenager with only rudimentary training in acting. But the young Sherpa has been shown some mercy here. Being the newest student in the workshop and the only one who has to face making his stage debut, he has had the good fortune to land a very simple role: Flavius, a less-than-supporting character who appears in just one scene. There is, however, a catch. That exclusive intervention occurs at the opening of the first scene of the first act. The moment the curtain is drawn and, in the dark, the audience falls into the most ominous of silences.