FringeReview UK 2026
A Slow Fire
Jermyn Street Theatre and Glass Mask Theatre
Genre: Contemporary, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
After premiering in Ireland, Simon Stephens’ A Slow Fire receives its London premiere at Jermyn Street Theatre, directed by Rex Ryan for Glass Mask Theatre till September 26.
Engrossing, with Stephens’ assertion that not just personal identity is constructed out of memory, but what makes us human.
Review
Jermyn Street’s basement theatre could get used to this. At the start of the year, Lyle Kessler’s Orphans struck a new note. This new play asserts distant kinship. Two men are telling each other stories. Their own histories in fact, roleplaying the past and its pitfalls so they have it “rigorous” as one says. So how a lecturer and college porter end up in a bunker is how Simon Stephens sees past apocalypse to bleak hope. Domestically. We end or start again telling each other stories. Here it’s to stop history shelving into myth. After premiering in Ireland, Stephens’ A Slow Fire receives its London premiere at Jermyn Street Theatre, directed by Rex Ryan for Glass Mask Theatre till September 26.
After this a new production will open with a different director, creatives and cast already named, in January in Chicago. One can see why. Stephens occasionally underwrites his more future-dystopic plays, not least Nuclear War (Royal Court Upstairs 2017). Not here. In a sense Stephens is writing against a lifetime of probing the eerie. He attempts something fresh. Not the apocalypse, but the day-to-day of how to survive it years later.
Stephens starts from the skewed refraction of two people roleplaying the history of each; how each remembers it. Sometimes these cross genders, possibly distort facts. Though you immediately sense roleplay, it’s only later the vectors of one person’s fears and flailing connections click with what we perceive. In one sense Beckettian (and with an Irish team), it’s diametrically opposed: hope and memory challenge ennui and forgetting.
Edgy Ashton (Ross Gaynor) is obsessed with map-making now all satellites are dead. It’s defining human activity against oblivion; his academic mind lights on it like a filament. Easier-going Reece (Ian Toner) is wracked with guilt over his relationship with his girlfriend when she announced they’d have a child. His subsequent fraught conversations with son Kai are played out too.
Toner is particularly fine at fighting remorse under a bluff everyman front. He’s also consummate at guying Ashton’s high-fallutin’ words; as he cosplays a professor telling Ashton he’s too trad to get promoted. Stephens playfully undercuts even the fabric of remembering.
The pair have lived here three years after an apocalypse more nuclear than climate-induced, in a lock-up Ashton designed with foresight, at the edge of a city. They don’t know if anyone else is alive. Foraging they meet no-one. Yet rail-track vanishes.
That is till Presley (Fionn O Loingsigh) breaks in, claiming terror as he waves a gun. A Slow Fire is often funny, in a Martin McDonagh kind of way. Occasionally people laugh in the wrong places, as Ryan tries adjusting tone. It doesn’t always work as Stephens here is tonally unstable when playful.
This naturally disrupts the dynamic, despite Presley joining the roleplay. He’s brought fresh pork “fresh is a relative term” though the water will only supply two people in the long term. Someone destined to read Law he claims, Presley walked the earth instead. His greatest trauma and shame revolves around a sister. More one feels might have been made of this; something weirder in the Stephens or Alastair McDowall mode this play seems pointed to. But sheers from. O Loingsigh’s performance is superbly unpredictable.
Stephens’ characters too are invested with unfolding back stories to reveal how and why they are. Gaynor’s the gnarled academic, still wedded to measurables. “Precision” is both more grounded yet perceives how fragile that ground – or its maps – are. There’s a remarkable moment when Toner’s Reece obligingly plays Ashton’s mother, dying. A moving scene transcending roleplay, it briefly validates everything the pair attempt.
It’s through repeated patterns of storytelling we discover not just facts and obliquities about Ashton and Reece in particular; but about how they – by extension everyone – construct personality, coping mechanisms; the emergence from silence into the slow fire of articulate humanity. Perhaps here starting over.
Andrew Clancy’s lock-up set with sliding grilles and a grubby interior – mattresses, camp-stove, a working record-player – suggests a dwelling you might construct, anticipating a less sophisticated world. It’s like Fifth-century Britons living in city ruins they no longer know how to repair. Migle Ryan’s costumes exude that grimed-in dye-bleed where everything shades to sludge.
Jess Fitzsimmons Kane’s lighting seems plain-bulb survivalism till it isn’t. Particularly fine are highlighted patches, turning spectral and other. As well as nudging shapes out of semi-dark. Glass Mask’s gale-force soundscape sliced with clangour – people stealing the iron tracks perhaps – is striking. A world is being crudely forged and broken.
Quite why Holly Delaine’s name isn’t mentioned when her character is and the U.S. Mary is listed (singularly, well ahead of production) is baffling. Delaine delivers a litanic monologue in a breathless gust: Stephens at his lyrically bleakest. It’s riveting. Mary’s actions are so singular you wish to see more of them; you believe in them because they’re strange.
Since the penultimate scene doesn’t feel thematically quite right, Mary’s reappearance might open up the denouement which closes pat after improbable scenes that sit awkwardly with one character. It’s as if Stephens remembered he had to be creepy. As it is, the conclusion now echoes the end of Mike Bartlett’s Cock, winding down into something elegiac.
This is though engrossing for the most part, over its slow-burn two-hours-fifteen. Stephens asserts not just personal identity is constructed out of memory and desire to preserve it, it’s what makes us human: the fabric of humanity, civilisation, the art of getting it right. Not withstanding it defines madness by trying it again and again. And not withstanding those caveats, absorbing.
Stage Manager Summer Keeling, Producers for Glasses Mask Theatre Rex Ryan and Migle Ryan, Producer for Jermyn Street Theatre Jessie Anand.
