It’s one of those perennial water-cooler questions. What would you do if you discovered that the world was about to end? John Morton’s Denouement is an intense and intimate double-hander that swirls and storms around this all-too-possible situation.
After a number of unforeseen false starts, stumbles and thwarted efforts, it is about to receive its long-awaited world premiere on the stage of the Lyric Theatre, as one of the highlights of Belfast International Arts Festival 2025.
The play is set in 2048. Among its themes it explores the process of ageing and long-established partnerships or relationships that shape the participants, what they’ve become, and how they’ve influenced each other, for better and worse.
Its focus is on the final days of a marriage between Liam and Edel, a writer and an artist respectively. It first came to the attention of Jimmy Fay, the theatre’s executive producer, in 2018, through the Lyric’s new-playwrights scheme. Final plans were in place for a coproduction with the Traverse Theatre for the 2020 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, when the Covid-19 pandemic intervened and all live performance was put on hold.
RM Block
“As events overtook us, the production turned into an online version of a play in progress, which we presented in autumn 2020, with Ian McElhinney and Marie Jones in the central roles,” says Fay, who will direct this first-time production.
“The play has never been staged. It’s got close a couple of times with us, the Traverse, even with Druid at one point, but I am delighted that we are at last bringing it home to the Lyric.”
Fay has cast two powerful, charismatic actors in the pivotal roles. Anna Healy, who was born in Derry and is now based in Dublin, was last seen at the Lyric in Druid’s acclaimed trio of O’Casey’s Dublin Plays, in 2024. She was a larger-than-life yet poignant presence in the roles of Rosie Redmond in The Plough and the Stars and Mrs Henderson in The Shadow of a Gunman, arguably one of the finest versions of the play seen in these islands.
Patrick O’Kane is no stranger to the Lyric. One of the leading northern actors of his generation, he recently played the racist farmer Bob Ewell in the West End production of Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Observer’s lead critic Susannah Clapp wrote of a blazing performance as a Klan-leaning bully. O’Kane’s portrayal of the unionist leader David Trimble, in the Lyric’s world premiere of Owen McCafferty’s Agreement, was one of many highly praised elements in that landmark play.
This work, whose title translates as the untying or unravelling of a knot, is deep and dark, searching and unsettling, but darkly funny, too. It delves relentlessly into the weeds, the bare bones, the suppressed dislikes and unspoken truths underpinning an ostensibly happy marriage.
As the minutes tick by, the couple’s remote home turns into a terrifying hothouse, but an unexpectedly close bond develops as each reaches out to the other, in confronting the imminent approach of the ultimate existential disaster, the very end of the world and of all human life.
The two actors explain that they have been aware of, or involved in, the play for some years and are delighted that this Lyric premiere has offered them a first opportunity to work together.
“The play was written, I think, in 2017 but, through no fault of its own, it has fallen victim to circumstances way beyond anyone’s control”, says O’Kane. “I’ve long been an admirer of Anna’s work, so it’s great to get the opportunity, finally.”
Healy recalls her first reading of the play at the Lyric in 2019, directed by Fay, with Frankie McCafferty in the role of Liam. In 2023 she did a staged reading of it for Druid in Galway, directed by Garry Hynes and alongside Seán Kearns. It was a complete sell-out. But only now does she feel that it is starting to hit what she describes as its true emotional arc, revolving around the couple and their human connection.
“It’s a real journey towards togetherness, towards genuine union,” O’Kane says. “They arrive there at the very end, but only because they have gone through an arduous trail where they’ve thought they were being honest with themselves and with each other, their marriage, their life together.
“They finally acknowledge their own failings, the other person’s grievances, and they come to a point where they are reconciled with the reality of the situation, in a very pragmatic way. And that enables them to have resolution.”
This quietly introspective conversation becomes increasingly intense as, at the end of the first week of rehearsals, the pair frankly exchange their views and interpretations of the play’s subtexts and hidden truths. Listening in, one feels oneself being drawn into the atmosphere of the rehearsal room, where these two thoughtful, analytical actors are slowly becoming enmeshed in the pending disaster of the drama.
“It’s a huge relief, and a sign of how open we are together, that we can have these conversations, because it is quite an intimate piece,” Healy says.
“The storyline is about a marriage, a long life together, and a strong element of mutual forgiveness, as they are shut up in this space. There’s a sense of stagnation after all these years. They’ve had their ups and downs, like everyone else, but there’s this epic landscape that it is set against them and abstracts them.
“It’s almost like an exile, a self-imposed exile, where they’ve been forced to come to this extreme moment, to stop their antics, if you like. It’s like a superconcentrated droplet of pure love that they eventually get to.”
“We do laugh a lot in rehearsal,” O’Kane says. “When you do these really dark, intense plays you end up having fits of the giggles, with Jimmy and Louise” – the director and the stage manager – “joining in – or showing us how to do it.”
The interaction between the couple, in their individual choices and actions, takes place within the four walls of their isolated house, where, after their children have flown the nest, they have chosen to spend the remainder of their lives.
“It is a home, a very real place, but it is abstracted by the way that it is set up in the production, slightly elevated above the stage,” Healy says.
“It’s like being marooned”, O’Kane says. “They’ve chosen to make a move, in the light of some familial instances that happened when they lived in a big town. They had a lot of social interaction there, which was central to their life. But they’ve removed themselves because of a series of things that happened between and around them.”
“It’s that idyll of believing that if you move, things will get better,” Healy says. “We all know that feeling. Things have never been really terrible in their marriage; they are just ordinary people. They are actually quite funny together and create moments of comedy unconsciously. Because they’re so familiar they’re quite at ease about being sharp and assertive with each other, in a funny way. They know the pressure points to pick on, to get the best reaction.
“They’ve become strangers in their own marriage,” O’Kane says. “That’s the starting point. And the denouement, the reveal, is that they reveal themselves to each other again and, in the process, renew their marriage.
“It’s very much a play about renewal in the face of an apocalypse. The tension is how we choose to deal with this dilemma, what you’d do if the world was about to end. These two deal with it differently. I choose to write a memoir of our life together. Edel thinks I’m wasting my time, but I have my reasons. She sets out to contact the children and, ultimately, to contact her husband”.
“It’s like when a knot gets tied, it gets tight,” Healy adds. “Then, when you try to untie it, it gets tighter and tighter, until you can find a way to unpick it. When you find the thread it unravels, just like that. Really it was obvious all the time. The answer was always there, in plain sight. They just had to find it.”
Fay says: “In the 80 years since the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, we have lived in the shadow of that event. From an early age we know two things: that we are going to die at some point and that a man-made catastrophe can end the world as we know it, in a short matter of time. Yet we get on with life, pursue happiness and raise families. It’s this shadow and light that the play deals with really well.
“I wanted to direct it and open it in Belfast because it’s such an extraordinary work. It offers great roles to two hugely gifted actors, and I want to see the fireworks fly.
“We are premiering it during Richard Wakely’s last curated Belfast International Arts Festival, so I hope people will come to check it out.
“It’s extremely funny in places, and offers immense hope. We’re human, but if we keep creating something, be it by writing our memories, cooking a meal, reaching out to our loved ones, holding on to each other in dark times, then there is always hope.”
“If anything, the play feels even more pertinent now than when it was first written, given all that’s going on, ecologically, militarily and politically,” O’Kane says. “It moves from chaos to stillness.”
“And simplicity,” adds Healy.
Denouement, which is part of Belfast International Arts Festival, previews at the Lyric Theatre on Tuesday, October 21st, and Wednesday, October 22nd. It opens on Thursday, October 23rd, then runs until Saturday, November 15th
