FringeReview UK 2026
Fire Fire
Arcola Theatre, Dalston with Metal Rabbit and Webber & Co.
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Arcola Theatre, Studio 2
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
John Webber’s Fire Fire premieres at the Arcola Theatre, directed by Jennifer Tang for Metal Rabbit till October 3. There’s a relationship with High Tide (as with several plays initially produced here), and the production will tour to East Anglia, Birmingham and Brighton after its Arcola run.
A very promising play, and Webber a highly talented political writer. The kind we so clearly need.
Review
“Things won’t change if I plan to never piss anyone off.” Some things though never change. Eddie is preparing something at the top of Bartlow Hills, the largest surviving Roman or pre-Roman burial mounds in Europe. He has a cylinder with him. Paige needs the site’s public toilet, and Eddie’s hostile. John Webber’s Fire Fire premieres at the Arcola Theatre, directed by Jennifer Tang for Metal Rabbit till October 3. There’s a relationship with East Anglia-based High Tide (as with several plays initially produced here), and the production will tour to East Anglia, Birmingham and Brighton after its Arcola run.
Middle-aged Eddie (Chris Simmons) and the younger Paige (Gabrielle Brooks) are at stand-off on the standing-stones. There’s prickly interchanges yet they keep meeting, seemingly by chance. Eddie is scattering his brother Jim’s ashes and – both worked for the oil industry – Jim died of cancer-induced asbestos poisoning. Paige probes why he’s not more angry. And indeed Eddie is. In a series of meetings till it becomes a matter of seeking each other out, Paige realises Eddie is far more furious than he lets on. Even Jim’s widow wants him to drop his case against the company. Eddie’s separated already. His firefighter son is becoming uneasy.
Paige too is enduring much grief from her partner Mel, whose near widowhood to activism grates on their relationship. Mel wants children. Paige doesn’t. Her fellow-activist Digs waits for every time Paige arrives here from Colchester. At one point she’s crafted a tunnel to get into the refinery.
There’s a gradual thawing and indeed rapprochement between Eddie and Paige, who discover they’ve not only far more in common than they thought, but a shared sense of history, which these mounds for a perfect analogy with. Whilst Paige can draw on Boudica and the neighbouring area’s history of tribes that rose with her against the Romans in 61 CE. She can also draw on the Nigerian pyramids and Goddess Ani.
Much contemporary activism is channelled here. Just Stop Oil till recently, people being jailed for five years just for planning a protest, and of course the government branding anyone terrorists for direct action far milder than the Suffragettes (who killed one person, blew up houses and as trained munitions workers would have blown up a lot more after World War One had they not been nervously granted minimal voting rights amidst 1918’s Bolshevik panic). The future Paige sees at the end is perfectly plausible. It’s already happening.
Indeed there’s two strands that anchor this play. The activism and the leaders calling off action, leaving its more radical members exposed, is one. Those who go on are doubly punished and indeed ostracised. Second, the cat’s cradle of history and mirrored experiences – partner abandonment and the death of parents – that makes Eddie and Paige relatable, indeed hopeful. There’s also telling moments, when Eddie comes across Paige breathless and traumatised. She’s emerged from the tunnel she’s been digging into the barrow area; having seen a vision of her mother. Whom for a long time she thought had abandoned her aged nine.
Set against this are borrowings. A Jerusalem moment when the pair bang on a drum and thwack everything with large sticks hollering on the gods might be prepared for here, though is a bit cheeky. But it’s no less probable. And there’s a particular denouement that’s been done before – and for similar reasons – in James Fritz’s Parliament Square. Again Webber prepares motives for this, indeed very strong ones, when you have nothing to lose. It’s possible Webber doesn’t know Parliament Square. Two echoes though are a bit high.
Pelayo Wang’s set – with Charly Dunford’s six slim lights around a small ascending and descending circle of steps – is remarkably effective. A few props like an oil barrel ensure nothing distracts from the 80-minute storytelling. When Dunford’s lighting also suffuses the studio its elegance is tailored to fire, its theme. Sarah Spencer’s sound is more sparing than the original directions, and more subtle. There’s noises off like faint police sirens but the police are more signalled by blue lighting from a corner. In so intimate, so spare a production, each component has to work at scale. Annite-Lunette Deakin-Foster’s movement makes maximum use of this confined space: the overall effect is ritual poise and relaxed – and tense -conversation.
Simmons convincingly edges his way from harrumphing gammon through hurt lone campaigner, to empathic friend and eventually an even more radical activist. This peripetia is classic but no less convincing. Brooks scales back her strident knowing persona where Paige’s vulnerability, doubts and confronting her past allow both Eddie’s growing friendship and Paige’s trust to shine through.
Echoes aside, Webber’s work might seem extreme, but for many it’s the only response left. The strength of this play is the unskeining and relaxed trust of two people telling their truths to each other. The play as it stands is either too short or too long: not as concept, but when you pack in prison like a lighthouse flash and the gathering crescendo with accelerated narrative, the weight of it can evaporate.
If this work were to expand its last 20 pages with skill and no loss of intensity (very tricky of course), then it would leap into the fire it looks for. Either that or simplifying some of the glancing late narrative like prison – that doesn’t quite clang shut – would also help. This is though a very promising play, and Webber a highly talented political writer. The kind we so clearly need. And with High Tide and Arcola, the kind of theatre with the courage to put them on.
Stage Manager Edie Latter, Assistant Director Mariia Daniliina, Casting Director Charlie Metcalf, Production Manager Helen Mugridge, BSL Interpreter Becky Barry. Producers for Metal Rabbit: George Warren, Simon Paris.
