The fire next time
Daniel Nelson
Talking About The Fire is the latest in a newish genre: one-person shows about serious topics, such as global population, worldwide animal extinction, and climate change. Now we have a show about nuclear bombs.
It defines itself not as mansplaining but as theatre because the fact-teller uses a couple of props, such as a laptop projector, to turn what is essentially a lecture into entertainment.
Chris Thorpe delivers it well. He draws the audience in by getting them, for example, to give their impression of an angry delete at a UN conference or naming a favourite place near their home. He gets a chuckle from the resultant good-natured repartee between presenter and punter. (Asked to name the biggest social problem on the map of central London, an audience member came up with “Parliament”.) There’s a point to it, too, as he pinpoints the places on Google Earth and then uses the map to demonstrate the extent of death and damage of a nuclear strike.
His focus is on the organisation set up by non-nuclear states and whether they can exert any leverage on the nine known nuclear countries: the US, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, France and UK.
There’s plenty of information; powerful images (including the 2020 non-nuclear blast in Beirut, to illustrate shockwaves from explosions and how comparatively small it was, despite its devastation; and music by Spotify.
Apart from a tendency to say “fuck” every other sentence, presumably to prove his man-of-the-people, ordinary bloke credentials, Thorpe is engaging, committed and pretty good at varying the pace and the balance between homey humour and scary information. He has a keyboard as well and after anticipating the audience’s fears that he might play it, he does so passably well.
It combines gentle entertainment with awareness of “a clear and present danger to the whole of civilisation.”
Ok, many aspects of the nuclear weapons debate don’t get a mention, but you can’t do everything in 90 minutes of agitprop.
It’s not theatre, in the sense of an intriguing story and character development. But it’s informative and worthwhile. To lighten the load after he paints one of many possible scenarios to the next use of a nuclear bomb - manoeuvring in the Russia-Ukraine war . He even offers a possible step towards nuclear disarmament.
Let’s hope.
* Talking About The Fire, £12 - £20, is at the Royal Court, Sloane Square, SW1 until 16 December. Info: Royal Court