A Slow Fire
Glass Mask Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Glass Mask Theatre’s astonishing world premiere of Simon Stephens’s dystopian play A Slow Fire opens with the jarring sight of two shabby figures who are holed up in a cold concrete bunker but whose strange, insistently warm chatter wouldn’t be out of place in a work canteen.
“Are you close with your dad?” asks Reece, a friendly college porter played by Ian Toner. The other man, sitting opposite, begins to sweat: “I’m ... not sure.”
In an absurd comedy performed underground during an apocalypse, people don’t always know their lines. “I blanked,” admits Ashton, a former professor from Reece’s college, played by Ross Gaynor, who had the forethought to build a bunker before the world ended.
Their storytelling is more than mere distraction; they are re-creating a defining moment in Reece’s life, when he asked out the woman who was to become the mother of his child.
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Their performances are a kind of psychology experiment by Ashton, revisiting lived experiences of hope – which he hypothesises is a uniquely human trait.
The sight of two figures re-enacting their lives in a grim basement may recall the surreal horrors of Enda Walsh’s plays, but Stephens also finds an on-the-pulse metaphor for our own era of diminished certainties and troubled diplomacy. During the day Reece and Ashton cling on to a more knowable past; at night they explore the dangerous surface with maps, trying to chart hostile new territories. It’s a new world order.
That brings an intriguing nuance to Stephens’s own study of hope. His play seems to be asking how much holding-out for the future is possible right now. It’s no coincidence that Reece and Ashton’s storytelling lingers on parents and children, on a happier time of proud achievements and thoughtful gifts.
Reece recalls an older relative who found meaning in death, knowing they were making space for a new generation – a comfort now lost. (“What if the world left to young people is cold and poisonous?”)
There is worse threat, still, in temptations to distort reality. At one point Toner’s Reece, eager and good natured, tries to assist Gaynor’s easily cruel and impatient Ashton in a re-enacted visit to his mother’s deathbed by suggesting a deviation from their usual approach: “What would you like to have said? Let’s make it up.”
After the surprise arrival of a mysterious outsider (Fionn Ó Loingsigh) who is carrying a much-appreciated electricity generator, Ashton and Reece’s storytelling takes place under brighter, harsher lights, and receives further suggested edits.
It’s an attractive irony that this tale of whittling chances receives an air-punching, odds-defying production by Glass Mask Theatre, whose intimate 60-seat venue almost shakes under the ambition of this epic thriller.
Rex Ryan’s propulsive production is more at home with the violent comedies of Mark O’Rowe than with Walsh’s turbocharged slapstick, presenting moments of poignancy with a heavy-hearted solemnity that occasionally costs Ashton his harshness, and risks Reece becoming too assertive.
The play is still a rollercoaster for our times. “I can’t stay here!” says Reece. “This isn’t living.”
A Slow Fire is at Glass Mask Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, February 7th
