Review: End Of isn’t necessary enough
Written and performed by Ash Flanders, directed by Stephen Nicolazzo
Review by Charlotte Smee
It’s an incredible privilege to be an artist in Australia. Ash Flanders recognises this by saying that theatre is “selfish, greedy and necessary”, and the art form that he uses to process his experiences of life at particular moments in time. It’s also an incredible privilege to be a critic in Australia. I am lucky enough to have a nice, bill-paying job that I spent six years studying to be qualified for, and a mother with a love for the theatre, design and art that she helped me to inherit.
End Of is a story about artists, and about mothers. Ash is an actor, writer, and theatre maker. End Of is his autobiographical one man show about his descent into mundanity through an office job as a legal transcriptionist. His long-time writing partner, Declan, who moonlights as an Artistic Director at Griffin Theatre Company, features in the stories he tells. Ash has performed on stages across the country, told many stories. He has a voice. He has a mother, Heather, arguably the second lead character in End Of. She is not an artist. She has not performed on any stages.
Heather’s catch phrase and title of this show is “end of”, as in “end of conversation”. Her life is close to its end, as Ash tells us, with her failing health, refusal to listen to doctors about the appropriate amount of back surgery, and love of cigarettes. She is not the focus of the show, but perhaps the reason why Ash makes art: she has a laugh that takes over her whole body, and the hard-won title of best storyteller at the Flanders dinner table.
Ash is a gifted storyteller too. He begins the play by drinking three glasses of water from an office water cooler, silently. We all have a giggle - he’s challenging our expectations, making us wait. He unpacks a collection of cardboard boxes on a mint green padded stage, with matching curtains opened to reveal a similarly padded back wall (thanks to Nathan Burmeister). He rolls around the stage, telling us about his first acid trip which resulted in a cuddle with a prop rooster, makes interesting connections between transcribing police interviews and writing fictional characters, and portrays the struggles of living in the shadow of an overbearing mother and the realisation that she feels just as small as he does. These are all important realisations to come to, and he recreates them believably. Sound and lighting by Tom Backhaus and Rachel Burke make the realisations into a theatrical adventure.
After the monologue finished, I wondered why Ash was telling this story and not Heather, especially if she was the best storyteller in the family. Why is it that she is a storyteller, but not an artist? Is it really because she didn’t want to be, or is it because she didn’t have the opportunity to be?
I am an artist and a critic because I come from a fairly financially secure family, and because my mum taught me to value artistic endeavours. My mum was told that she shouldn’t become a graphic designer because she wouldn’t make any money. She studied accounting instead. When she became a mother, she sent me to piano lessons, to drama lessons, took my siblings and I to musicals and plays, read books to us every night, played music every moment we were awake, showed us that art is necessary, important, fun and joyful. When we moved to Wollongong, she sent us all to a performing arts high school. If my mother had the opportunities that she gave me, and was told that her stories were important, maybe she would have been an artist, a critic or even a graphic designer. I can only imagine the reasons why Heather is a “just” a storyteller, and Ash is an artist.
In Australia the reason why Heather or my mother (and many other mothers) aren’t given the space to make art lies partly in funding, and partly in who we decide to give time and space to tell their stories on our stages. There are many other parts to the story that are largely attributable to capitalism and gendered labour. Most countries in the OECD in 2019-20 spent 1.23% of their total GDP on culture, recreation and religion, according to this report. Australia spent only 0.95% of our GDP on cultural pursuits. In 2019-20, we spent 42% of that 0.95% figure on museums, libraries, archives and heritage, and 31% on film, radio and television. A mere 27% of that money went to the broad category of “arts”, which includes the performing arts.
This lack of funding, in the theatre world, means there are a very small amount of shows on main stages, and an even smaller amount of artists able to sustainably make those shows. It also means that Artistic Directors in Australia, because of their dependence on people with money to pay for tickets to their shows, often make safe choices with known artists so that they don’t lose that precious money.
If we lived in a country with lots of stages, lots of spaces and lots of funding for people to showcase their work, then End Of might have been a fun and interesting reflection on being an artist. The reality is that we live in a country where spaces on stages are scarce, and funding is scarce. The voices that are given space on stage are valued over and above those that aren’t, whether they mean to be or not. Sadly, we cannot just ask whether this play was “good” — whatever that means. We must ask whether it was worthwhile, or more necessary than other works that might have played in its place. If we have to ask whether End Of is a necessary work, in Australia’s dire theatrical landscape, the answer might already be clear. What a privilege it is to be mundane.
End Of plays at the SBW Stables Theatre until 5 November. Find tickets and information here.
Images by Brett Boardman.
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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