It is difficult to concentrate on writing a memoir when a nuclear reactor is flashing nearby and neighbours are killing themselves. Playwright John Morton and director Jimmy Fay wring maximum dark humour from this dystopian two-hander, set in 2048 at the end of days. As Liam (Patrick O’Kane) and Edel (Anna Healy) are bunkered in a remote cottage on a mountainside, gradually being engulfed by smoke and fire, they have no idea how many more hours they have left before everything is obliterated.
In the high stakes of this drama, the focus is not on possible causes of the global catastrophe, but on bringing this long-married couple to crisis point as their time is running out. What plays out, bleakly, are the different ways each character attempts to reach some kind of reckoning with their lives: through drugs and alcohol, manic boogieing or tentative prayer. While Edel tries to contact their adult children and friends, to stay in touch with the outside world on patchy phone connections, the conversations and media bulletins all bring news of death and horror.
Ingeniously designed by Maree Kearns (set) and Chris Warner (sound) as a graveyard for obsolete technology, their barricaded cottage is dominated by looping digital time signals, flashing numbers and ancient video screens. As Liam hammers out his memoirs in “hard prose” on a manual typewriter, his persistence seems driven by a churning sense of guilt; he is writing a confession. “Everything is your fault”, he mutters, blaming himself, for reasons hinted at and later spelled out unnecessarily.
His hands never far from his shotgun, Liam initially seems the more volatile of the pair, but Edel has her own recklessly destructive impulses. In O’Kane and Healy’s riveting, emotionally nuanced performances, their confrontations escalate dangerously. With or without the apocalyptic premise, the intensity of their portrait of a marriage burns through.
• Until 15 November at Lyric, Belfast, as part of Belfast international arts festival, which runs until 9 November
