Theatre Review: Denouement at the Lyric Theatre

The word denouement comes from the French dénouer, meaning “to untie.” In storytelling, it’s the moment when the knots of a plot are loosened — when everything unravels, and truth is laid bare. It’s a fitting title for John Morton’s Denouement, now playing at the Lyric Theatre, because unravelling is exactly what we witness — the end of a marriage, a family, the end of the world, and the fragile threads of humanity that bind the two together.

I walked into this production not knowing what to expect. Within minutes, I learned it was about Armageddon — but not the action-movie kind. This is the quiet, eerie, and heartbreakingly human sort of end. The year is 2048, though you wouldn’t entirely know it. The staging is impressive, but its rustic, analogue world feels more like the 1990s than a futuristic dystopia. There are flashes of technology — electricity, computers, mobile phones — but they almost feel deliberately out of place, as if to suggest that even at the end of days, we cling to the familiar trappings of the past.

At the centre are Edel and Liam, a married couple holed up in a remote Irish farmhouse as the world collapses around them. It happens to be their wedding anniversary — a darkly comic coincidence that gives rise to the play’s most biting lines (“We’ve had worse,” one quips). Liam (Patrick O’Kane) spends his remaining hours hammering away on a battered typewriter, desperate to document their life together. Edel (Anna Healy) is fixated on the outside world, making futile calls to reach their children. Between them lies a lifetime of love, resentment, and unspoken truths.

At its heart, Denouement is about choice. Do you face the end, or take control and leave on your own terms? This question hangs over the couple like smoke. The play handles it delicately — never sensationalising, never glorifying — instead offering a deeply human portrait of two people reckoning with love, regret, and mortality.

Healy and O’Kane are tremendous and deliver with raw intensity and authenticity. Their chemistry feels lived-in, the kind of shorthand that only years of shared history can create. They bicker, tease, confess, and comfort each other as the clock ticks down. The dialogue swings between dark humour and heartbreak, often in the same breath. “The end of the world,” Liam notes, “and it happens to fall on our anniversary — and we’ve had worse.” It’s lines like that which give Denouement its bittersweet charm.

The writing by John Morton is sharp and fearless — tragic and absurd in equal measure. It doesn’t give us easy answers or even tell us what caused the apocalypse. Instead, it asks what matters when there’s nothing left to lose.

By the end, Denouement leaves you sitting in quiet reflection. It’s a play that lingers — not because of its special effects or dystopian premise, but because it captures something achingly human. Love, guilt, forgiveness, and the terrifying beauty of saying goodbye.

A world ending never felt so intimate.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Powerful, darkly funny, and deeply moving. Denouement is the Lyric at its best: bold theatre that stays with you long after the lights come up.