It’s the end of the world, not just as we know it, but actually in John Morton's play Denouement, premiered as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival at the Lyric Theatre this week. A couple are waiting for the apocalypse – Liam is finishing a memoir that won’t be read or survive, Edel is trying to contact their grown-up children. They do a bit of coke. Drugs were found in a crashed van by the man, alongside the dead driver. Death waits outside their heavily locked back door. They argue, come together, argue again. It’s about looking at your life in the final scene and finding some meaning.
John Morton’s dystopian drama was an audio play during lockdown, with Ian McElhinney and Marie Jones starring. This outing is well staged and very well acted by Patrick O'Kane and Anna Healy. They make the end game believable, at times even entertaining. One of the stand-out passages is when Liam dances a drugged up, manic dance around the room. It’s richly comic. One of the saddest moments comes when Edel finally gets her daughter onscreen and exchanges goodbyes with her granddaughter Niamh.
There is conflict and pain in there as well as heartbreak. We learn of one affair, Liam’s, and that denouement with a suicidal woman wanting a last kiss is perhaps melodramatic. There is also some repetition, as there would be in this situation. We learn of Edel’s flirtation and near fling in some humorous phone calls that do not end well. There are repeated crashes and bangs from outside and it’s revealing that Edel who drunkenly said she wanted to die before she was killed by outside forcens dances and gives herself to her fate while her husband hides under the cheap desk.
The set is untidy, cluttered with the collections of two lives. The ending is oddly hopeful and Jimmy Fay has directed the play with sensitivity.
Jane Hardy
Denouement runs until November 15.
