Heads Up

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Fittingly for a show about the end of the world, omens abound in Kieran Hurley’s excellent new one-person play. Discovery Channel documentaries about the collapse of the Roman Empire stalk late-night TV; a teenager plays the decades-old computer game Sim City and destroys her creation with a Godzilla monster; flashes blaze across the sky. These dreadful signs are relayed by Hurley himself, sitting besuited and barefooted at a table, a selection of musical cues and effects at his fingertips.

He exudes a homeless radio announcer vibe, telling us four interweaving stories about four people, whose ordinary days are preludes to the end of days: a financial trader who has sacrificed relationships for career; a Muslim zero hours staff member at a high street coffee shop; a teenage girl caught up in a sexting furore at her school; a fading, vain pop star with a thing for bees.

They never meet. Their disparate classes, backgrounds and stories underline Philip Larkin’s observation that the end is the greatest leveller of all; that “all streets in time are visited”. Hurley regales their stories in the second person – a tricky narrative high-wire act. But it works. The machine-gun repetition of "you" gives proceedings an urgent sermon-like feel. Even more so when, nearing the conclusion, Hurley breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the ‘you’s in the audience and questions why we are here. Is it, as he suggests, because we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the beginning of a new one? Is fear more vivid than hope?

So, from a show that is flecked with anger and more than enough brimstone for the entire world, what emerges is something challenging, but subtly optimistic. Just like every good sermon.