“I’m exploring how it feels to live in a world built on constant crisis”

Multi-award-winner Kieran Hurley weaves a picture of a familiar city at its moment of destruction, asking what would we do if we found ourselves at the end of our world as we know it, in his new one-woman show presented by Show and Tell.

“A city. Just like this. Right now. A teenage girl boils up in rage in a toilet cubicle. A finance worker preaches doom in a busy train station. An absurd coke-addled celebrity races through town on a mission. A paranoid stoner stares blankly at the endless disasters on the TV news. In just one moment, all their worlds will end.

“Superb storytelling theatre… Hurley’s new show is a quiet hurricane blowing through the city. It is an anxious whisper that becomes a shout; a moment of silence that turns into the high-pitched whine of catastrophe.”
★★★★ Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

What’s the thrust of the show? Are you inviting us to imagine how the end of the world might feel… or how we (all wrapped up in our own little worlds) would experience it? 
Good question! The idea of the end of the world in the show is really just a big clunking device for talking about how it feels to live in a world that is built on constant crisis. Each character is living out their own quite distinct personal crisis in which everything their lives and their worlds are built on has become completely unsustainable.
I guess together I hope they paint a picture of a way of living together that has itself become completely unsustainable. And the end of the world is a big storytelling device that opens up a way of exploring that in a sort of interesting way. There’s a kind of inevitability to it in the story, and when it comes it prompts each of the characters to do something they otherwise might not have been able to. So I suppose I am kind of inviting you to consider how the end of the world might feel, and what you’d hold dear and meaningful in those final moments. But I’m also just using it as a big metaphor for our own broken lives under capitalism. And it was a lot of fun to write from the starting point of this big biblical sci-fi trope.

Tell us about the format of the show… is it you and a laptop, a story and a few sound effects?
It’s me, at a desk. On the desk is a script, a mic, a candle, and two samplers that each contain different elements of the soundtrack which I operate from the stage. It sounds kind of weird I suppose, and maybe it is, but I believe there’s a kind of logic to it when you see it.
The sense is of me conjuring these stories and this city that they’re playing out in – and so when I trigger a sound that signals the apocalypse or whatever, that is tangibly different than if that sound was operated from offstage. It’s me doing it, I’m ending this thing because it feels in some necessary for it to end – and that action then has a different meaning than if it just happens from above. I mean, it’s not really important to me that you’re conscious of this, I’m just saying it’s not random – there’s a process behind these decisions.

Bleak subject matter… but do you hope the show offers anything cathartic (and if so, what)?
I honestly had no idea how people were going to take to it when I made it, because I made it kind of uncompromisingly for me. It’s a show very much about how I feel or was feeling about things.
But it turns out lots of other people have been feeling kind of the same. So there’s something cathartic in that act of sharing, when it really lands for people. And a lot of people have commented that is hopeful somehow, or even called it a kind of rallying cry. If that’s what people take from it, then great, because it means it’s not as simple as despair. Which I’m really glad of because just despair on its own is really rubbish and useless, isn’t it?

Does the show echo your own feelings about society now… and as such are those feelings predominantly bleak or hopeful?
Yes I suppose it does. Like, I’m really glad when people take a kind of hope from what the show has to say. In its humanity or something I suppose. We absolutely need hope, it is the most radical and necessary thing. But it has to come from a real place. I sometimes feel that, in seeking hope we can sometimes settle for a kind of hollow optimism based on a sort of denial. And that’s not actually what hope is. Hope has to come from a place of honesty, where we start by acknowledging just how fucked things really are and then begin to work from there.

Is there comedy in there too, and if so, where does that spring from?
Yeah, I mean I think there is! Mostly – I hope – it just comes from the characters being likeable. I mean, some of them are awful and completely unlikeable – but, I hope, recognisable in a way that can be amusing. Like there are situations and lines in there which are definitely written with an invitation to laugh. But at the same time the show is not lit for laughs, the overall tone is not light – so there is a tension there sometimes, and it can be interesting to feel that tension in the room.
This is all just a fancy way of saying it contains dark humour. Laugh if you want to, don’t if you don’t. Some audiences sit in focused silence, some are ending themselves as I describe one of the character’s blood spilling across the floor in a ludicrous frenzied apocalyptic fight scene. Either is totally fine.

Kieran Hurley performs Heads Up at the Wardrobe Theatre on Tue, Feb 27 and Wed, Feb 28. For more info and to book tickets, visit thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/heads-up

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