Ash Flanders loves the drama. So much so that the committed actor, writer, and proudly flouncing flaneur laboured for years in dinner theatre. Sticking fast to the cause ever since (except for that odd little blip in legal service admin), he’s a survivor, crafting a glittering career out of mining his loved ones’ misfortunes for hilariously melancholic shows. Works like End Of, addressing the ailing health of his muse, his beloved mother, and This is Living, riffing off his boyfriend’s cancer scare that played out during lockdown.
Both foolishly unsuspecting souls pop up in Flanders’ latest gem, meta-textually unmooring Melbourne Fringe show A Brief Episode. Funnily enough, it could see him splash into legal waters as murky as the crims whose garbled statements he used to jot down poorly. You see, Flanders is making a TV pilot about him, his mum and his hon (who did not sign NDAs). Or at least he might be. For confidentiality reasons, having signed away his life on the dotted line, he’s not supposed to say. So he’s keeping its existence (or not) as vague as a gay man fond of spilling the tea can (not very vague at all).
Faced with the suddenly real(ish) promise of becoming a star in the making of his own life’s drama, all Flanders has to do is whip up 45 pages of a pilot in the steadfastly unfriendly screenwriting software tool Final Draft, whose ominous name heaps on even more pressure. Staring frantically at a blank screen, he decides he and his man must change the scenery, setting off on a (quite broke, actually) odyssey to their favourite holiday spot: Greece.
Only the heroin addicts cluttering the street underline that their Athens Airbnb is cheap for a reason, and the words just won’t come. When a portentous pigeon promptly meets its dramatic end – care of a glass window and the world’s smallest hawk – it sets in motion a pained hero’s journey into the literary labyrinth. One that involves deranged dogs (not the three-headed variety), American divorcees and coked-up Australian execs, as all roads lead back to his mum (as mythological journeys are wont to do).
Once more teaming up with equally talented End Of director Stephen Nicolazzo, the pair keep this emotional voyage into similar territory simple on the surface. Flanders pops out from behind a curtain evoking the stately drapes depicted in many an ancient Greek statue (except neon pink) and plonks himself on a floodlit director’s chair in racing green. Off he careens on an energetic monologue that folds in unbridled artistic passion, monstrous self-doubt spiked with dopamine hits of unbound self-assurance, and the open wound of mortality smuggled in like soldiers in the Trojan horse.
While many of Flanders’ sassily snappy asides in this quite brilliant show are uproariously funny, it’s the inescapability of losing our loved ones that’s the true beating heart (even if it has been ripped from their gaping chest cavities in a sacrificial act devoted to the theatre gods). We can only hope the TV show pilot he has possibly penned, one centred on his omnipotent voice like oft-bickering couple Zeus and Hera, comes to pass. Because judging by the mirrored glimpse of what might be we get here, it’ll be divine.
A brief episode is playing at Trades Hall until October 20 and you can grab tickets here.
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