Gaia and pyramids in the line of fire
Daniel Nelson
It’s really difficult to write about climate change for the theatre: focus on the global crisis and a play will lack personal drama; spotlight the personal and you risk losing the big picture.
Fire, Fire at the Arcola Theatre is the latest attempt to square the circle. This two-hander goes for the personal option, with strong performances and sharp dialogue.
Paige and Eddie’s environmental meet-cute occurs when he blocks her way to a toilet in a country park, sometime in the near, increasingly hot and dry future. She is on an anti-oil company demonstration, he is organising a memorial for his brother, which he doesn’t want her to interrupt.
Eddie is a white, retired oil refinery worker, grateful for the job that gave him an ok life, and concerned not with global heating but with the industrial lung disease that killed his brother. She is a middle-class climate protester of Nigerian heritage.
Their sparky meeting, fuelled by mutual class stereotypes of each other, does not bode well. But in their subsequent meetings in the park a few details of their lives and feelings begin to leak out, and both begin to be affected by what they hear.
Of course the personal is political but putting the emphasis on their personal motivations suggests that actions against global polluters and corporate impunity stems from our treatment as children or from frustrated grievances. Perhaps it is, but that leaves unanswered questions about the pluses and minorities of environmental damage, the justification of direct action, the state’s role in policing protest, and other related issues which are currently swirling around the UK in terms of curbing protests and banning organisations.
The combustible combination of Eddie’s anger and Paige’s rejection angst finally explode into a frenzy sparked not only by frustration but by Gaia, the ancestors, gods from different lands, shared dreams and Essex burial mounds (known locally as “pyramids”.
Too many spirits for my taste, not enough about protest.
* Fire, Fire, £15 - £29, Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street E8 3DL until 3 October. Info: Arcola. East of England Tour, 6 – 24 Oct 2026
Writer John Webber said, “I grew up in Thurrock which is this slice of land that sits between the Thames and the A13 and should be marshes really. My housing estate is what you’d expect to find in any inner city from the1960s - wall to wall concrete and nothing to do - but it’s surrounded by this Green Belt countryside. So as a kid I would walk out with my mates into the wheat fields, see cows, play in the disused abattoir - all the joys of the countryside. This play is full of that tension between the industrial and the bucolic in a way.”