Review: FIRE FIRE, Arcola Theatre
Two-hander set in a near future of climate breakdown and authoritarian policing
John Webber’s new play addresses issues too often neglected by London theatre, whose willingness to tackle political issues (at least those that do not primarily concern identity politics) fails to live up to its privileged presence in the public sphere. For jumping into that void (well, near void) Fire Fire can be commended.
Eddie is lost - a 20th century Essex man left behind by a world now lacking traditional trades unions, without a widely shared consensus on how to behave in the public domain and peopled by men and women whom he does not recognise. Worse, he has lost his brother and he thinks he may go the same way - workplace acquired asbestosis. He wants to fight back but, of course, he doesn’t know how.
Paige is everything he is not. A 21st century middle class, young, black climate activist, she is embracing, indeed building, the new anti-consensus and is prepared to make the personal sacrifices from which Eddie, and the few people still left from his life before he retired, shy away from. So too those allies that retreat in the face of a ruthless harsh punitive sanctions, much extra-legal.
This comes out in a torrent of backstory exposition at the start of this 80 minutes two-hander and sets up what I expected to be a feisty examination of the how we live collectively today, how we balance rights and responsibilities and how we can salve wounds that fester in the conflicts increasing seen on our streets. Left to sort themselves out, we all know what happens next in that scenario.
Gabrielle Brooks and Chris Simmons convince in creating wholly believable characters to butt heads on Peiyao Wang’s firepit of a set. Jennifer Tang avoids a key peril in directing a two-hander by keeping the actors moving and is rewarded by performances that do as much in the reaction moments as they do when Eddie and Paige are talking past each other and then, more and more, talking to each other, common cause found.
The problem comes from what they say, the direction in which the narrative turns. The play veers into metaphysical discussions of ancient pagan religions, the lost indigenous cultures of the British Isles and West Africa and a veneration of a more authentic Albion now gone forever. If I did not care for such meanderings in Jerusalem, I’m not going to care much for them in Fire Fire either.
By the end, we’re in dream sequences and references to the more extreme protests against the Vietnam War and, perhaps, an evocation of Roman Catholicism's death cult ideology. The politics of policing protest have left the building along with the sharper dialogue of the middle section of the play, melodrama, regrettably, crowding out drama.
I’m afraid I was as lost in Fire Fire’s world at the end as Eddie was at the beginning.
Fire Fire at the Arcolas Theatre until 3 October and then on tour
Photo images: Mark Senior
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