FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2025
BIAF 25: Denouement
Anna Healy (centre) as Edel in 'Denouement'. Photo: Ciaran Bagnall
The pleasure of the nostalgic and the pain of the dystopian merged, reanalysed and revitalised as a ninety-minute play, John Morton's Denouement bathes and commands the main stage of Belfast's Lyric Theatre with a structure and aura that both earns and demands full on attention and engagement. Top tier performances from Patrick O’Kane and Anna Healy, along with smartly balanced directing from Jimmy Fay, are central to drawing a staggering level of theatrical power from Morton's confidently layered script, a serious challenge rich in reward for both the production team and the audience.
Opening with the strains of the Roger Bowling-penned "Blanket On The Ground", a song featuring a middle-aged woman attempting to spark her tentative husband into life, Denouement takes us to an unspecified future date and right into the heart of the strained relationship between married couple Liam (O'Kane) and Edel (Healy). With the end of their world seemingly approaching - hence, Denouement - Liam appears determined to document their memories. All while Edel - like the woman in the song, maybe? - seems keen for both her and Liam to not only really live as much as they can, but to also get in touch with family. Either way, they're both trapped in a country dwelling at a distance. And given the context of trying to balance some form of normality with the dangers surrounding them, tensions can't help but accordingly escalate.
Patrick O'Kane and Anna Healy in 'Denouement'. Photo: Ciaran Bagnall
The detail in Maree Kearns' set and Sarah Jane Shiels' lighting, which I was particularly wowed by in Rhiann Jeffrey's production of Our New Girl at this very venue, is equally wow-worthy here. Keepsakes from the past, necessities from the present and technology from the future are all cluttered together in a claustrophobic "room" that houses Liam and Edel while their only alternative is a not-at-all-great outdoors. The front of Liam and Edel's angled room even dips right into the audience, perhaps not unlike Alton Towers' Oblivion rollercoaster when it's taking its famous vertical drop. We're really on the edge here, and the play is very upfront about it with an ambitious tone that is wholly fitting for the strength of the material and the acting.
Assisted by strong vocal work from Thomas Finnegan, Grace Walsh, Debra Hill, Laura Rodriguez-Davis and Zeb Soanes, O'Kane and Healy effortlessly and naturally compel in depicting the sensitivity and anxiety which can arise from confusion and desperation in the lives of their characters. O'Kane and Healy are equally at ease with the genuinely humorous or off-kilter moments in Morton's script, which include entirely unpredictable and very clever uses of music and dance that go beyond being merely interludes and into crucial character development.
Patrick O'Kane and Anna Healy in 'Denouement'. Photo: Ciaran Bagnall
By the time Denouement, or quite probably the worldly denouement within Denouement, enters its final throes, one is fully invested in both Liam and Edel. Liam, with his insistence on typing memoirs on an old-fashioned typewriter, is clearly mistrustful of technology - one gets the impression that its evolution has come too fast for him, in the same way it might have come too fast for many. It's also fair to consider that if Edel had her way, she probably wouldn't use modern tech either – but what happens when you need to depend upon said tech to communicate with the outside world, especially family? Some things just can't be ignored, whatever their adaptive complications. I think viewers who once looked forward to renting their favourite film on VHS or DVD, and now have the same film available to them, with all the accessibility features they can wish for, at a touch of a button, will relate – as undeniably helpful, even astonishing, as such changes have been, the newly connective ease leads to a commonly collective unease. Once the physical makes way for the digital, the treasurable aspects in the humane and the soulful can be threatened. It is an enduringly identifiable level of apprehension which permeates and strengthens the production.
Denouement, like many of the best period or science-fiction works, is exemplary in its facing of what lies beneath the nostalgic, the creative, or both. It's heavily illustrative of who and what we love and why we are drawn to everyone and everything we hold dear, while also eloquent and explicit in reminding us that the world can't and doesn't run on love, and love alone. It's about the universal theme and fear of a fleeting, imaginative dream eventually or suddenly translating to a fearful, distant nightmare – in the form of Liam and Edel, a couple indicative of various chances to live dreams prior to the nightmares at the very end of their world. It is a unified search for spark and dynamism either in memories or in moments – and in being so, cements and clarifies the equally unifying value of Liam and Edel to us.
Simon Fallaha
Denouement runs at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival 2025 #BIAF25 until Saturday November 15. For more information, and tickets, click here.