Pilgrims by Elinor Cook. Photo: Nobby Clark.

There was a time in 2012 (and if that sounds horribly jaded, I don’t mean it to be) when everyone vaguely interested in the potential of writing online would wax lyrical about the New York Times longform investigation Snow Fall. It was a proper old-fashioned piece of reporting: a story of an avalanche, followed over years. Multiple sources, and the soothing luxury of a proper media organisation to check their facts were right. But it also had everything that the birth of online-only journalism could have promised, too: beautiful design and huge, wide-angled panoramas of mountains that evoked some of the lure that they had for the group of tourists who risked their lives to explore their slopes. Producing Snow Fall was scaling a kind of Everest, but this chilly achievement hasn’t been replicated by intrepid explorers with ever more technically advanced equipment behind them. If you were going to be uncharitable, you could say that formerly lofty publications have used the frictionless ease of writing online to facilitate a race to the bottom.

The story of Snow Fall is only relevant to Elinor Cook’s Pilgrims in so far as they’re both about mountains and the risks people take to scale them. But the bait-and-switch device of this intro is exactly the kind of thing Cook serves up. She makes you think you’re watching a play about one thing: two male mountaineers, former teen prodigies pushing for high after high, and caught between a woman that loves first one, then the other. Then she lets her story slip into something a little more self-aware, a little colder.

These people can’t live out a love story without smudging its pages, tearing into the cliches. Rachel and Will stand on the edge of a Welsh hill: “No, but have a proper reaction”, he tells her, when she fails to pour out more than a stilted “It’s beautiful”. Later, with Dan, Rachel does have a “proper reaction” that’s no more real than her faked praise: she cancels her dream job, destroys her possessions because, as Dan says, “That’s romance for you!”

But sometimes the satire of romantic tropes feels painfully blunt: like when Rachel casts herself as the fairy queen in the medieval ballad she’s been reading, or asks “Does there always have to be a girl? Does she always have to be a prize?”.

It’s a play I like a lot more in retrospect than I did at the time (it wasn’t helped by being performed in a stuffy village hall. Or by a set design, a stylish square of Dutch blue-and-white tiles, that made the mountain feel so distant and silly that we couldn’t invest in its terrors, even before the meta-narrative closed in).

But that’s maybe because all these layers of stories feel so much more seductive on the page: in medieval poems, characters are forever stepping out of the narrative to ask why this, why them. On a stage that’s already strewn over and treacherous with layers of unreality, it feels frustrating.

There’s so much fascinating detail to this play, on a literary level – reading back the text was a constantly surprising, an immersion in three different viewpoints and their all-saturating preoccupations. But Tamara Harvey’s direction doesn’t find a way of making these perspective shifts feel lucid – with a narrative this slippery, it’s hard to find a foothold.