THIS week alone there are five shows in the York Theatre Royal Studio: theatre experiences of the blink-and-you'll-miss-them variety, but what better way is there to discover diverse, independent, Fringe work.

Still to come are Bellow Theatre's Bare Skin On Briny Waters tonight at 7.45pm and Jane Upton's childhood memoir Finding Nana, directed by former Pilot Theatre associate director Katie Posner, with performances at 2pm and 7.45pm tomorrow

Well, that's presumably if the world is still spinning after it ended with a snuffed-out candle in Show And Tell's apocalyptic vision, Heads Up, on Thursday night. Mind you, the world has been ending explosively in writer-performer Kieran Hurley's one-man show ever since the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe where it won a Scotsman Fringe First award.

In a suit, open-necked shirt and bare feet, Scotsman Hurley settles at his seat at a table. He takes his time to light a candle, but by the end he will have the haunted look of a man in a futile hurry, caught up in the whirl of a city on the brink of an apocalypse. There are desk lights; a script that he will keep turning; and a console on which his long fingers tap regularly to trigger Michael John McCarthy's music and white-noise soundscapes.

Hurley is in the room, but he could equally be in a radio recording studio, like Orson Welles doing his infamous reading of The War Of The Worlds that sent America into a panic one Sunday in 1938.

Fuelled by his own anxiety over our economic, environmental and humanitarian present and future, Hurley's lyrical yet alarmist show ponders what would we do if we found ourselves at the end of the world, the mortal coil running out.

He does so by skilfully interweaving the end-is-nigh stories of a finance worker preaching doom in a crowded railway station; a teenage girl boiling over in a loo; a coke-head celebrity racing around town on some kind of an increasingly blurred mission; and a paranoid stoner staring blankly at disaster after disaster on the news.

Hurley's hurly-burly tour-de-force is so gripping, and darkly humorous too, it is a shame it has to end after 70 minutes.