A Slow Fire
Simon Stephens is a playwright whose recent work has been found on big stages with starry actors like Andrew Scott and Ian McKellen. So this four-hander (that for the most part is actually a two-hander) that debuted in Dublin makes for a startlingly intimate affair.
Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Ian Toner) have become unlikely bedfellows stuck in a bunker together while an apocalypse rages outside. Three years in, they know everything they could possibly know about each other, and maintain what little sense of hope they can by roleplaying key ‘moments’ from each other’s life – selecting treasured memories as you might a show on Netflix.
The conversation teeters on the philosophical in places (is hope a blessing or a curse? Should they be drawing maps to preserve a memory of the land they remember, or attempting to head out into whatever it’s become?), but for the most part it’s a frank and relatable look at what really matters if you were to strip everything else away. For Ashton, it’s memories of a crush, a promotion, his mother; for Reece, it’s his son.
‘Trapped in a bunker’ is a convenient scenario for a play, not least because it negates the problem of tricky set changes, and ‘there’s an apocalypse outside’ is an obvious ploy to drive characters into said bunker – which is to say that we’ve seen this set up before. But Stephens really gets the cogs whirring over what any of us might do under similar circumstances. Case in point is the appearance of a fly, which at...