Review: FIREWING, Hampstead Theatre

For a play ostensibly about wildlife photography, we don’t actually see too many photographs in Firewing. Instead, this is a story about truth: our relationship to it, how we represent it, and what it can cost us.

This two-hander, the debut from David Pearson, an alum of the Hampstead’s INSPIRE programme for aspiring playwrights, revolves around Tim (Gerard Horan), an ageing wildlife photographer, and Marcus (Charlie Beck), a directionless 22-year-old from the same working-class coastal town.

Marcus has come to Tim’s ramshackle cabin – rendered by designer Good Teeth with a level of claustrophobic detail that makes the space feel much smaller than it is – for some sort of apprenticeship, the details of which are never quite explained. It soon transpires that things are not quite as they seem: Marcus has really come to the cabin to steal Tim’s prized vintage camera, a Chekhov’s Gun lurking at stage right.

Tim, meanwhile, is in Captain Ahab-style pursuit of the titular Firewing, an elusive Siberian bird of prey he photographed years before, never to see again. It’s never clear whether he actually saw Firewing in the first place (or indeed if he just made it all up), and Marcus is similarly evasive when telling stories of his father in prison and mother suffering from depression.

The dynamic here – the curmudgeonly, isolated older man and the gregarious yet troubled protege – is well-trodden ground. Horan and Beck do a fine job, though, of capturing the duo’s mocking barbs giving way to hints of grudging respect. Nevertheless, Pearson’s writing seems to take a while to break itself free of the shackles of the sitcom dynamic, and take a deeper plunge into the interior lives of these men.

This is a shame, because the latter third of the show is structurally inventive: off the back of a violent outburst, Pearson takes us back to Tim’s childhood and difficult relationship with his father, before reuniting him with Marcus for a moment of mutual understanding. But there’s not quite enough emotional foundation established in the bloated earlier scenes – too much time is spent on banter, and not enough on Marcus and Tim’s motivations – for these structural flourishes to feel like much more than footnotes.

Pearson has perhaps given himself one too many balls to juggle here: Marcus and Tim are both making life-shaping choices that the narrative needs to explore in full, while also exploring their interpersonal dynamic, and also what drove them both to photography. The commentary on social mobility also gets lost in the thick of things, and doesn’t go much further than gesturing at the fact that these characters are from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

Instead, some of the most compelling scenes are those which shift the focus back to photography itself. Horan as Tim commands attention as a charismatic would-be university professor, pointing out what makes his artwork great and opening Marcus’ eyes to the ethical conundra facing photographers documenting injustice. Pearson clearly has much to say on why we make art, and so perhaps Firewing should have zoomed in more closely on the quest for artistic glory represented by its title.

Firewing plays at Hampstead Theatre until 23 May