Kieran Hurley’s new solo 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.
Sitting behind a desk, unassumingly dressed in a suit like someone regretfully delivering bad news, Hurley tells of the end of the world through the stories of four people whose lives are disconnected. There’s Mercy, a futures trader, who suddenly realises while staring at her computer screen that there is no future. Abdullah, an anxious minimum-wage coffee-shop employee, is barely surviving but must keep his face in a rictus grin because company policy demands he’s always “people perfect”. Ash is a computer game-playing teenager whose ex-boyfriend has posted a picture of her which has gone viral. Leon is a cocaine-fuelled, image-obsessed pop star who latches on to Instagram causes while remaining blithely unaware that his own life is a carcrash. His girlfriend gives birth alone.
Operating the table-top equipment to create a pulsating soundtrack to all of these people’s lives, Hurley weaves their stories together with a quiet urgency, caught in a pool of light that keeps the encroaching darkness at bay. I kept thinking of a polite Cassandra.
Like Hurley’s previous show, Beats, this is superb storytelling theatre. It shares something in common with Christopher Brett Bailey’s This Is How We Die, but Hurley’s vision of the apocalypse is one fuelled less by rage and more by a quiet sorrow. He’s giving us the heads up – only we have the power to make the connections and changes that could avert disaster.
- At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August (not 15 and 22). Box office: 0131-560 1580.
