With A Brief Episode, Ash Flanders is back in the theatre, where he feels most at home. After a stint writing a television show based on his life, and enduring compromise after compromise as his art clashed with the realities of commerce, he’s written a one-person show about the experience, which he’s now performing at Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Flanders’ most recent projects have been drawn from his life – including the 2023 Malthouse production of This is Living – but people of this reviewer’s vintage will remember him as one half of award-winning queer and experimental indie theatre company, Sisters Grimm, with Declan Greene – currently the Artistic Director of Griffin Theatre Company.
In A Brief Episode, Flanders’ comic writing and acting chops are properly on display as he flits from anecdote to unbelievable anecdote: his attempts to write his pilot episode of his television show while on holiday with his partner in a dodgy neighbourhood in Athens populated by heroin addicts and roving gangs (of youths, of dogs). Then there’s also his navigation of new friendships with a group of loud Americans and working through the challenges of reducing his pilot episode (and life) to 30 minutes of screen time.  Â
Flanders’ show is an entertaining hour-and-a-bit of comedy, heavily influenced by the mythic storytelling conventions and structures of ancient Greece. He is a storyteller investigating the origins of Western storytelling itself, by way of his own hero’s journey to the land where it began – a meta narrative, designed to help him understand his own true purpose and (as the television producers ask him) what is pulling him forward.Â
In the spirit of the Homeric Odyssey, the story is full of meanderings, tests and omens – although it does feel the middle needs a bit of structural tightening. The television show Flanders is writing centres on the relationship between his character (him) and his character’s (his) mother, and this relationship also provides an emotional ‘turning point’ (as Flanders and the TV producers refer to it) in A Brief Episode.
However, the relationship remains relatively opaque, as the bulk of the show revolves around Flanders’ hijinks in Greece and Albania, meaning there is less time for the audience to invest in the relationship that should provide this emotional turning point.Â
Read: Performance review: FUTURE, Trades Hall
Despite this, A Brief Episode is clever, entertaining narrative comedy by a first-rate comedic writer and seasoned performer and is well worth catching this Melbourne Fringe Festival. Â
A Brief Episode
Trades Hall
Written and performed by: Ash Flanders
Directed by: Stephen Nicolazzo
Tickets: $29
A Brief Episode will be performed at Trades Hall until 20 October as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival.
