Ross Gaynor and Ian Toner in A Slow Fire [Alex Brenner]

SIMON Stephens’ latest play is a slow burn. Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Ian Toner) are holed up in a bunker after an unspecified apocalypse.

The men spend their days reenacting pivotal personal memories to keep hold of their past selves. The ritual recalls Estragon and Didi’s attempts to fill time in Waiting for Godot. Gaynor and Toner work well together without the older duo’s clowning.

Stephens replaces Beckettian alienation with human resilience. He takes time bedding in these scenes, making the first half feel slightly drawn out. Still, the Jermyn St Theatre’s intimate underground space heightens the claustrophobia of Rex Ryan’s stark staging.

Ashton was a professor of theology, and Reece, a porter at the same university. Ashton draws maps of their surroundings to give structure to their shattered world.

They are visited by a young woman, Mary (Holly Demaine), who delivers a feverish list of everything destroyed by fire, before vanishing. Like Lucky in Beckett’s play, she suggests the breakdown of rationality in a post-apocalyptic landscape, though her brief appearance also underscores the absence of a sustained female perspective.

The men’s routine is disrupted further when Presley (a destabilising Fionn Ó Loingsigh) arrives brandishing a gun, claiming he has meat and a portable generator. The tension escalates as a masculine power struggle unfolds – will loyalty or oneupmanship triumph?

A Slow Fire poignantly explores trust and doubt, how memory brings both comfort and pain, and the solace of storytelling. Stephens has clearly thought hard about loyalty and endurance after catastrophe. Wisely he leaves much to our imagination. The questions he raises linger long after the final curtain.

Until September 26
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/