Loosely based on Ray Bradbury’s *Fahrenheit 451*

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. You just have to convince people to stop reading them.”

Ray Bradbury’s *Fahrenheit 451* depicts a dystopian future in which reading is forbidden, constantly lit screens consume people’s free time, and the very act of thinking causes physical discomfort. Ironically, the fire brigade is no longer employed to put out fires, but to burn books and, if necessary, their owners. 
The book was published around 70 years ago, in 1953, but is set in the future – specifically, the 2020s – which is to say, today. Yet here you are in the 21st century, reading this text – so was Bradbury wrong? It depends on how we define a dystopia: a prediction about the future that is eventually confirmed or disproved, or a warning about the present that keeps coming back? 
*Fire Was the Cure* explores and reinterprets *Fahrenheit 451* freely, devouring it as one does with a beloved book, read a thousand times and carried to a thousand places, marking it up, leaves it lying about somewhere and then finds it again, whilst the cover fades, the paper comes unstuck and the pages fill with notes, sticky notes, bookmarks and memories. Five performers retrace the novel’s story, identify with the characters, and move horizontally, mapping out the shadows, the things Bradbury does not explain or tell us, creating parallel narrative threads and theoretical digressions, whilst also constructing chronicles of an interim era between our present and an anti-cultural future in which dumbing down saves us from the burden of complex thought.
If Bradbury had been wrong by just a few years, if *Fahrenheit 451* were to actually happen, what would we do?