Author Virginia Woolf once imagined the sky above Cambridge University as “lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere”.

She was writing in 1922 after years of romanticising the University and maligning the patriarchal systems that kept her from it.

Seventeen years after Woolf’s description, a club formed to test her theory: the Night Climbers, an infamous association of undergraduates who climbed the sandstone chapels and towering steeples of Cambridge University throughout the 1930s.

One much mythologised story tells of the group hoisting a Volkswagen onto the University’s Senate House building. It’s an alluring slice of history. But like the University that birthed it, the group was ostensibly a boy’s club.

Climbers, a new play from Melbourne indie company Fever105, uses the club’s deeply patriarchal history to consider the obstacles that hinder women’s success in academia. While its aspirations are high, the show loses its footing under the weight of historical accuracy and overwrought dialogue.

We open on Rosalind (Meg Taranto) and Lucy (Veronica Pen Negrette), bright-eyed first years at Newnham College in 1939. Rosalind is the self-described “adventuress, detective, writer”, “the next Virginia Woolf” (Woolf would be invited to the college in 1928). Lucy is there on a scholarship. She’s less bookish than Rosalind...