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.

“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.