A Slow Fire

Ross Gaynor in Simon Stephens' A Slow Fire. Image, Irem Akay

****

T.S. Eliot famously claimed there is more in a poem than the poet knows themselves. The same might be said of playwrights and their plays. Olivier and Tony award-winning playwright Simon Stephens' latest work, A Slow Fire, receiving its world premiere at Glass Mask Theatre, making the point. Described as two men trapped in a post-apocalyptic bunker looking for hope in the stories they tell each other, you could argue that the act of telling stories is what denies them hope. Art, or at least the barbed art of storytelling, tethering them to values and ideals of a dead past they can never hope to reclaim. Both men trading reality for fantasies and seeking escapism in reliving selected memories. Ashton, a former theology professor making maps of their deserted city, declares it an act of hope for the future. But the lad doth protest too much for being determined to avoid the real cost of building a future. Something Reece, a simple porter, dreams of. Each co-dependent and ailing when the unexpected arrival of the mysterious Presley shatters their claustrophobic universe with his generator, a gun, and ruthless survival instincts. Setting the cat and the pork amongst the proverbial pigeons. Hard choices and unvarnished truths suddenly forced upon all three. Asking what is to be hoped for following an existential, social, cultural, moral and environmental apocalypse? How do you rebuild from the ruins without rebuilding the ruins? Especially the ruins of masculinity?

Ross Gaynor and Ian Toner in Simon Stephens' A Slow Fire. Image, Irem Akay

And there’s the rub. That dirty word that chronically has ‘toxic’ welded to it. For A Slow Fire might explore hope when the future looks hopeless, the present unliveable, and the only place of escape is the past, but it does so from a male perspective. A play by a man, about men, played and directed by men exploring what it means to be a man in the ruins of patriarchy. A play much needed and long overdue. Not that masculinity is Stephens' sole focus, but you could argue it’s his primary one. Grounded in an exploration of the stories men tell of ourselves. The case for stories questionable merit given support by the play’s structure. A Slow Fire neatly divided into two acts, each built from several scenes. The first act primarily concerned with telling stories in the form of mini plays. It’s two shabbily attired protagonists, costumed superbly by Migle Ryan, capturing faded elegance and practical functionality, retelling hopeful events from their former lives as a way to escape a hopeless present. The second act, with the arrival of the insidious Presley after an accusing premonition worthy of Don’t Look Back, sees consoling fictions traded for raw, brutal facts. Fantasies giving way to reality as plays within a play find themselves performed to an audience other than the audience. A darkly humorous scene where Presley engages with their storytelling device sees Ashton looking on, laconically bemused, like a discouraged playwright or a disappointed director. Yet ultimately it's not stories, or even theatre, that connects these broken men, but music. The Ink Spots To Each His Own beautifully accentuating their tactile avoidance. Heightened in a touching song and dance sequence, later resolved into a powerfully subversive final image.

Ross Gaynor in Simon Stephens' A Slow Fire. Image, Irem Akay

When it comes to narrative and characterisation, Stephens keeps stakes and conflict to a minimum, leaving a terrific cast to dig deep to establish substance. All three delivering meticulously crafted performances pitched at a level that brims with subtextual intesity. Their world of artifice rooted in lived reality. Ross Gaynor offering a sublime treatise on the insecurity underscoring Ashton’s need for security. Fionn Ó’Loingsigh's terrifically understated Presley a manipulator with dark tendencies. Modest Alpha males to Ian Toner’s sensational Beta male Reece. Whose hopes are caught between two men, neither of whom understand who he is or what he might be capable of. Toner delivering a masterful performance in a masterclass of sensitive performances imbued with awkwardness, embarrassment, longing, confusion, and perplexity. Rex Ryan's vigorous direction balancing pacing and the composition of plays within a play and performances within performances to harness visceral energy. Ensuring you may not always know what’s going on, but you always feel it, Evident in the rapid shifting of eyes, momentary pauses for understanding, in gentle but firm insistences. Pressing against the confines of the stage, eager to burst out and envelop the audience. Visually and thematically, shades of Beckett and Enda Walsh’s absurdist landscapes are married to the claustrophobic, male intimacies of Sebastian Barry’s On Blueberry Hill and Frank McGuinness’s Someone To Watch Over Me. Tones mirrored in Jess Fitzsimons Kane’s artificial glare and orange lights troubling the grills of Andrew Clancy’s cramped and disheveled nuclear set; both awash with loud grumblings torturing the air during scene changes. Reinforcing a sense of doom and futility in a landscape where nothing can grow, let alone hope.

And yet.

Fionn Ó’Loingsigh, Ross Gaynor and Ian Toner in Simon Stephens' A Slow Fire. Image, Irem Akay

As the world worries about its fraught future, and masculinity continues to redefine itself, plays like A Slow Fire are crucial in allowing men to speak to men, about men, so as to articulate new paradigms of shared and contrasting male identities. A brave, experimental work that struts and frets its two and a half hours upon the stage, A Slow Fire signifies not the last word but the beginning of a conversation. That the conversation sometimes stammers is not to undermine its power. A Slow Fire suffering an excess of scenes, and scene length on occasion, which causes durational drag at times, reinforced by lengthy scene changes. Some, like the semaphoring watch reveal, begging to have been managed better even for economy’s sake. Even so, if A Slow Fire is a sometimes imperfect production of a sometimes imperfect play, it’s proof positive that a Simon Stephens play is far richer than the sum of its individual parts. Forever aspiring to tenderness and strength. A Slow Fire asking if men might learn to take care to, and of each other, as lovers, or brothers, bonded in passionate, vulnerable embrace? Now that’s a future worth hoping for. That would be something fresh and wonderful to see. As, indeed, is A Slow Fire.

A Slow Fire by Simon Stephens, runs at Glass Mask Theatre until February 14th.

For more information visit Glass Mask Theatre