Theatre: Heads Up

Four stars

WHAT would you do at the end of the world? Stare while the sky turned red? Tell work you can't make your shift? Cower and hope it's false alarm? Why not post an “apocalypse selfie” on Instagram?

“Thanks for being here at this time – in these times,” says writer-performer Kieran Hurley sombrely, opening the follow-up to 2012's Beats, a bristling monologue which won Best New Play at the Critics’ Awards For Theatre in Scotland.

“This is a story about a city like this one, here and now. It's a story about the end of the world."

Sitting behind a desk in a suit that looks like it's been slept in, his drained face bathed in the yellowy glow of a few uplights, Hurley could be a reporter who's helmed the last few 24-hour news cycles single-handedly.

Music created by composer Michael John McCarthy is cued by Hurley via two table-top consoles; four soundtracks to four disconnected lives. There's similarly exhausted Mercy, a trader in futures who knows each new crisis creates opportunities to make money. Something big is about to happen. Bigger than just another crash.

There's Ash, a teenage girl attempting to create a sustainable town on Sim City while avoiding her exasperating boyfriend. Leon, a popstar, sits in a meeting with record company execs, seeking solace in cocaine snorts, environmental campaigns and the proxy love of social media. Barista Abdullah sits at home, the debt collection letters mounting while he reads a warning email from his employers. No longer is a pound of flesh enough for minimum wage; they want their customers to experience an emotional connection with their rictus-grinning, under-the-kosh, “people perfect” employees. Each is isolated in their own desperation.

Mercy, who has been “too busy for friends and things like that”, attempts to wipe-out her new knowledge by going on a bender. Abdullah, his neurons frazzled by long hours and paranoia, can't tell if the people dressed only in underwear outside his coffee-shop are anti-capitalist protesters or mystery shoppers. Leon, scratching around for a new cause to support, seems to have forgotten his girlfriend is about to give birth. “We didn't need you,” she tells him when he finally arrives at the hospital. Ash, meanwhile, hides in the school toilets, her fist stifling a scream. Her ex has just sent around a picture of her. But what's that smell? Chlorine, like a swimming pool?

Like much of Hurley's work, Heads Up is driven by the basic human need for connection in an increasingly atomised world. As Australian journalist Waleed Aly ingeniously characterised it recently, the endless crises and outrages of global events, packaged in “breaking now” media hysteria has put us all on a kind of

Gravitron, a spinning fairground ride which forces its riders to the edges, away from each other. And though never explicitly said, the catastrophes taking place outside the solitary bubbles of Hurley's characters need collective solutions. He makes us complicit in their self-absorption: each of the four are addressed by him as “you”. There's anger and anxiety here, certainly; they fuel his poetics with rhythms which are often hypnotic, often startling. Some of those lines are so beautiful you want to pluck out and hold against the light.

But there's heart and humanity here too; while familiar, none of his characters are one-dimensional and are each performed with subtle differences of tone, speech and inflection. This isn't just story-telling, it's brutally effective theatre giving us the heads up on the potential future of a culture which seems content to imagine how the world will end rather than how a new one may look.

Until Aug 28 (not 15, 22), Summerhall (Old Lab) (V26), 7.05pm (60mins), £11, (£10 concs). Tel: 0131 560 1581.