Edinburgh Fringe 2025
The End Is Near
Persistent Theatre Productions
Genre: Drama, Storytelling, Theatre
Venue: Church Hall at St James Church, Leith
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
An intimate and unflinchingly human exploration for fans of ensemble theatre and realism.
Review
Melissa Ainsworth’s The End Is Near takes an overfamiliar headline, “the end of the world”, and recharges it with sharp humour, painful honesty and the kind of lived-in detail that cuts close to the bone; an unsettling but necessary conversation about the reality we currently reside in, and which this audience is left questioning.
This is no disaster movie; instead, Ainsworth’s writing roots itself in the smaller implosions of everyday lives, specifically the lives of three women from three different centuries, at their worst hour. Dialogue flickers between quick-fire sarcasm and moments of poetic stillness or revolutionary song. We are thrust from scene to scene, to witness the ramblings of an single incarcerated mind and the rebellion of a universal consciousness; the pleading victim and the raging freedom-fighter; which gives the piece an uneasy rhythm that mirrors its characters’ fractured states. We laugh, sometimes despite ourselves, only to find the ground shifting to something tender, then devastating, then back again.
Persistent Theatre Productions keeps staging minimal, a choice that highlights the rawness of the performance. Light and sound design are spare, evoking collapse without spectacle. What really holds the stage is the ensemble’s presence: attentive, vulnerable, unafraid to inhabit silence. Even when not speaking, each performer breathes with the tension, reminding us that endings are rarely solemn, sombre or silent affairs.
The production’s strength lies in its refusal to preach. Instead of telling us how to think about collapse, it shows us how people stumble through it. Audiences are left unsettled, reflective, and oddly grateful for the humour threaded through the bleakness. Tighter staging and simpler transitions, so as to reduce distraction and pulling focus, are small drawbacks to this much-needed exposition of our world today. The irony of staging in a church hall, where sound reverberates loudly, adds haunting nuances to the unfolding scenes.
The End is Near confirms Melissa Ainsworth as a voice to watch. Persistent Theatre Productions deliver it with their trademark intimacy and bravery. The apocalypse has rarely felt this close, or this strangely funny.
If you didn’t see them at EdFringe, you can catch them in London: Presented with Drayton Arms Theatre September 9th-13th 2025 at 19:30
