The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts was published by Faber and Faber in September 1936 and first performed at the Mercury Theatre, London, on February 26, 1937. Written collaboratively by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood — the second of their three plays together — it is a verse drama about a mountaineering expedition to a strategic Himalayan peak, driven by colonial politics, media manipulation, and the leader’s unresolved relationship with his mother. It is at once a political allegory, a psychological study, and a theatrical experiment that captures the peculiar intensity of 1930s English literary leftism.
The Play
Michael Ransom — mountaineer, scholar, ascetic — is persuaded by his twin brother Sir James (a government minister) to lead an expedition to climb F6, a peak on the border between British and Ostrian colonial territory. Whichever nation plants its flag first will control the region. The expedition is thus simultaneously a feat of personal courage and a tool of imperial policy.
Ransom knows this. His intellectual clarity — represented by verse soliloquies of considerable power — sees through the political machinery. But he goes anyway, driven by motives he cannot fully articulate: rivalry with his brother, desire for his mother’s approval, the ascetic’s attraction to self-destruction. The mountain kills his companions one by one. At the summit, Ransom finds not triumph but his mother — a vision that is either revelation or hallucination.
The play alternates between the mountain expedition (verse, symbolic, expressionistic) and scenes of ordinary English life (prose, satiric, domestic) in which Mr. and Mrs. A — an Everyman couple — follow the expedition through newspapers and radio, their boredom momentarily animated by vicarious adventure.
Context
Auden and Isherwood wrote three plays together: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). All were produced by Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre. F6 was the most critically successful and remains the most revived.
The play draws on the culture of 1930s mountaineering — Everest expeditions as national propaganda, the cult of the gentleman adventurer — and on Auden’s reading of T.E. Lawrence (the ascetic hero seduced by power) and Freud (the mother-complex as engine of male ambition). The political context is the approaching war: colonial competition, manufactured patriotism, the manipulation of heroism for state purposes.
Benjamin Britten wrote incidental music for the original production — one of several Auden-Britten collaborations from this period.
Collecting The Ascent of F6
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1936): Orange cloth binding with black lettering. Dust jacket with mountaineering imagery.
Identification points:
- “First published in September Mcmxxxvi” on copyright page
- Faber and Faber imprint
- Joint credit: “by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood”
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $500–$1,200. The Auden-Isherwood collaboration, the 1930s Group Theatre context, and the general scarcity of fine prewar poetry firsts all contribute to demand.
First American edition (Random House, New York, 1937): Published the following year. Less sought than the Faber first ($200–$500).
Signed copies: Extremely scarce from this early period. Copies signed by both Auden and Isherwood are particularly desirable — $3,000–$6,000 when they appear.
The play’s dual authorship, theatrical history, and connections to Britten, Doone, and the Group Theatre make it a crossover item — collected by Auden completists, Isherwood collectors, and enthusiasts of 1930s British theatre.