HEADS Up turns up at the York Theatre Royal Studio tonight after winning the 2016 Scotsman Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Fringe and the 2017 Best New Play gong in the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland.

Presented by Show And Tell and written and performed by Kieran Hurley, the show is doing the regional rounds once more after two sell-out Fringe runs and a nationwide tour in 2017 with its depiction of the life of a city at the brink of an apocalypse.

Hurley's show, co-directed by Alex Swift and Julia Taudevin, weaves a picture of a familiar city at its moment of destruction, asking what we would do if we found ourselves at the end of our world as we know it.

Complemented by sound and music by Michael John McCarthy, Hurley's performance intertwines the stories of starkly different modern lives: a teenage girl who boils up in rage in a loo cubicle; a finance worker who preaches doom in a busy railway station; an absurd coke-addled celebrity who races through town on a mission and a paranoid stoner who stares blankly at the endless disasters on the TV news. In just one moment, all their worlds will end.

"Heads Up is about living in a world built on disaster," says Hurley. "It's about how we make sense of our lives in the context of global catastrophe; economic, environmental and humanitarian. It's difficult to say what the impulse behind making it is, beyond needing to deal with the feeling of incredible anxiety I sometimes have when reading the news. There are some jokes too though, don't worry.

"It bears a clear relationship to some of my previous work if you liked that, but it's also unlike anything I've made before. I'm trying out some entirely new approaches as a performer, through a really innovative sound design by Michael John McCarthy, which I'll be controlling and operating from the stage."

Tickets for tonight's 7.45pm performance are on sale on 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk