End of the World FM – The Space, London

Writer: Kevin Martin Murphy

Director: James Tudor Jones

In a post-apocalyptic near-future, one man is trapped in his room, unable to leave or communicate. Whatever cataclysmic event has befallen the earth seems to have knocked out the internet but retained an electrical grid. So to keep himself occupied, the man does the old-fashioned, pre-podcast form of shouting into the void: he starts broadcasting on radio.

End of the World FM, written and performed by Kevin Martin Murphy, starts one year after the apocalypse. Murphy’s Host seems to be a fan of the pointlessly aggressive, endlessly shouting style that originated on US talk radio. With no idea if anyone is listening – and no way for them to get in touch if they are – that self-imposed performative mania begins to become his real personality, too.

At least, in the most optimistic reading of Murphy’s writing and performance, that is what happens. The Host is almost perpetually bellicose, sweatily shouting throughout. It’s easy to imagine that the character is adopting a persona to cope with the trauma of what is happening to the world. But when what we are seeing and hearing on stage is a performance of a performance, there is very little with which to engage emotionally.

Occasionally the facade drops. Behind the Host’s pomposity, there is someone broken by the world, with a vulnerability that is immediately more identifiable. We as a population have come through an extended period of enforced isolation due to the Coronavirus pandemic. But we had the benefit of online communications and the hopes that it will not be permanent, so it’s not a huge leap to empathise with someone in a similar situation who has neither.

But as soon as the veil falls away, the Host rushes to dismiss the moments of vulnerability and resumes his faux posturing. The result is a relentless barrage of noise that suffocates anything useful or engaging. It also doesn’t help that over the course of the play’s hour, fifteen years pass – and the Host plays his gratingly loud performance at the same level throughout.

There is respite at times, with a disembodied female voice (Rachel Verhoef) – maybe on tape, maybe some other broadcaster elsewhere in this post-apocalyptic world – offering a calming, more resilient take on the struggle for survival.

There are hints in Murphy’s monologue at the desire to critique 2023 by using the perspective of a world that ought to be much, much worse, but is merely differently awful. But like much else in End of the World FM, that is drowned out.

Continues until 29 July 2023