Writer: Simon Stephens
Director: Rex Ryan
While it’s a coup for Jermyn Street Theatre to land Simon Stephens’ new play after a short run in Dublin earlier in the year, it’s a shame that A Slow Fire is no Motortown or Sea Wall. This overlong and talky play set in a post-apocalyptic world feels very minor Stephens indeed.
Taking place in a bunker, two men and then, later, a third, shelter from the outside where the sun no longer shines and where dust covers everything. They suspect that possibly there could be more survivors, but for now, they only have each other. Its single location, reliance on memories to keep them sane, and the repeated refrain of a song put one in mind of Frank McGuinness’ vastly superior Someone To Watch Over Me.
It begins as if it will be a meta play about acting. The two main characters chat about going to an exclusive Indian restaurant, but there’s some kind of trouble between the men. One likes the other in a romantic way and tells him that he should leave his boyfriend. The scene ends abruptly, and a new name for one of the characters is provided. It seems as if they are rehearsing for a play.
A Slow Fire’s first half is peppered with these rehearsal scenes, and Stephens keeps the audience on its toes as the switches between genders and sexualities finally yield to the truth. It’s certainly an original way to ‘do’ backstory without stolid exposition, and it’s very intriguing at the start. However, once the audience understands the conceit (way too early, perhaps), it is stolid exposition nonetheless.
Ross Gaynor is Ashton, a young academic with a penchant for cartography. He goes out at night to walk the streets of the nameless town and comes back to the bunker to map it all out meticulously on paper. The survivors of the disaster will need to know how to create and read maps in the future, Ashton surmises.
The identity of Reece, played by Ian Toner, isn’t revealed until midway through the second half. Reece is the calmer, more caring of the two; he makes bowls of rice on a gas stove in a corner of the bunker and tends to Ashton when he is sick. He’s often reluctant to act in the rehearsal scenes, but once he’s agreed, he plays the characters with gusto.
Fionn Ó Loingsigh’s Presley is a late and welcome addition to the shelter. Giving off Mark Rylance vibes, Ó Loingsigh’s character is erratic and dangerous, lending some much-needed drama to the production, which doesn’t even come close to a slow burn, let alone a slow fire. The end’s shocks splutter out of the ashes rather than explode.
The set, designed by Andrew Clancy, is a little dull, but what else can you expect a shelter in a lock-up to look like? The uncredited sound design is better, the grinding of outside so strong that one can almost taste the dust that encrusts the roads and rails of civilisation.
The most incendiary scene happens in the first half when a woman called Mary (Holly Demaine, much younger than Stephens’ stage directions) barges in to offer an elegiac description of how the world ended. Presley says that he’s fond of Dante and Milton, and this is what A Slow Fire needs: more poetry.
Runs until 26 September 2026
