New Critical Voices: Helene Ott - A Slow Fire

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

New Critical Voices: encouraging a diversity of critical viewpoints through real time opportunities for aspiring critics.

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion declares in the famous opening line of The White Album. How do we make sense of tragedy and chaos? Storytelling, Didion answers. We look for the sermon in suicide. We impose narrative upon disorder and uncertainty. In his new play A Slow Fire, Simon Stephens takes a page out of Didion’s book.

In a bunker in the aftermath of an amorphous apocalypse, Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Ian Toner) pass their time acting out significant moments of their past. What they try to find in these post-mortem sequences is unclear. But the entertainment is decidedly limited. For Ashton, a theologian and former professor, there is also cartography: the mapping of the dead landscape for future generations. Reece, who used to be a porter at Ashton’s university, is emotionally uncommitted to maps. Ashton however clings to the passion from his youth like the memories of his childhood best friend, and presumably first love David. Brilliantly played by Gaynor, Ashton is armoured in masculinity. A solid front of composure and competence. Wanting to be in control and keep their world contained. Gaynor’s portrayal capturing the quiet tension between outward stoicism and inner vulnerability. Revealed in fleeting glimpses of tenderness that simmer visibly throughout. Ashton embodies not only a suppression of reality but also of his desire for connection. Exemplified in a tender scene of both physical and emotional intimacy. Bashfully slow dancing to a hummed version of The Ink Spots’ To Each His Own. Celebrating their 4th Christmas in dystopia the dance transgresses the pantomimed intimacy of the performed moments. Displaying the search for tenderness in the bleakest of settings.When Reece tries extend the moment, asking to share a bed, Ashton pulls back. The scene as fragile and uncertain as reality itself. Toner delivering a performance of profuse complexity. Waving guilt and hope. Rugged yet open. Wearing his heart on his scruffy sleeve. Grounding Ashton’s abstraction with a humanity that feels both desperate and deeply sincere.

Simon Stephens' A Slow Fire. Image, Irem Akay

Stephen's plays are perpetually concerned with questions of loss and life after tragedy. Unlike Sea Wall, which is stark realism, A Slow Fire investigates these themes through a refractive frame. Investigating grief and connection at the end of civilisation. Through plays-within-a-play Stephens reflects on storytelling as an antidote to stagnant grief but also as a dissociative barrier to reality and real connection. Men locked in a male limbo. Seeking intimacy but keeping it at arms length. Reminiscent of Sartre’s No Exit or even John Carpenter’s The Thing.

But it’s not a shape-shifting organism that intrudes on their men-cave, or rather Brokeback Bunker. It’s a sketchy survivalist called Presley (Fionn Ó Loingsigh) who comes bearing a gun, generator and fresh meat. The latter enough to distract Reece from otherwise Machiavellian vibes. His arrival in the second act immediately challenges the frame and nature of Ashton and Reece’s life and relationship. What happens if three men hole away from the patriarchal structure of civilisation because there’s no such order left? A strange but profound homosocial love triangle set in the wreckage of it. Like Sophie’s Choice with Chekhov’s Gun. Ó’Loingsigh managing to embody a character of immediate duplicity but charming vulnerability. From the first moment we know he’s no good, but, damn it, look at his sad eyes! Presley appearing like a wounded wolf in sheep’s clothing, immediately threatening Ashton’s monopoly.

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

His arrival is eerily prophesied by the only female character - more ciphering apparition than actual person. While the moment aspires to a haunting, post-apocalyptic resonance, the overlaid distortion flattens the vocal texture, producing a cluttered polyphony that distracts more than it unsettles. A diegetic inconsistency in an otherwise perfectly balanced sound and set design. With tinny, grating noise supported by Jess Fitzsimons Kane’s urgent, harsh lights complement Andrew Clancy’s claustrophobic set. Both minimalist and clustered. In and out of darkness. Evoking that dreadful sense of purgatory in imminent collapse although the apocalypse is left vague and off stage.

Much like the narrative, the setting appears disjointed and defamiliarised but also viscerally intimate. Director Rex Ryan takes full advantage of the tight space of the Glass Mask Theatre, where the curtain opens right in front of our noses. The effect uncanny. The play pressing into our shared reality as Ashton and Reece’s reenactments push against the confines of theirs. A weird form of meta-theatre that makes us weirdly identify with the characters. But the story never relies too heavily on this tool. Instead, it gradually strips itself of it until only bare reality remains.

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

A Slow Fire doesn’t look for the moral or social lesson in apocalypse or death. Rather, it puts a poetic and experimental lens on the complexities of unraveled male relationships. If there is any lesson it’s quite simply love, in whatever form, can prevail. Stephens resists the temptation to romanticise despair or provide neat resolutions. Instead, he lets the embers of tenderness, grief, and memory smoulder. The result a play that burns not with spectacle, but simmers with intimacy. Finding meaning in fragments and connection despite collapse. Living defined by shifting unpredictability and endless big and small grievances. Hope alive within the moment, not memories. The play resolving in a gentle embrace that feels like neither end nor beginning. Unstuck in conclusive narrative structure. Lingering with affect and tenderness that feels genuinely genderless. A story that leaves you with no definite answer is one you carry home - like A Slow Fire. With, very possibly, the melody of To Each His Own.

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

For more information visit Glass Mask Theatre

Helene Ott is a student of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. Alongside her studies, she works as a writer, painter, and freelance photographer specialising in portraiture and visual storytelling.