Life on Earth: The End is Nigh

The Endling at the Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, on Saturday, November 27. Review by Jon Lewis.

Strange Futures’ new devised comedy The Endling, warns us about the current global ecological disasters affecting life on earth. We’ve just had COP26 in Glasgow with its policies to avoid temperatures rising by another 1.5 degrees, so this is a topical debate. Created by Jane George alongside performers Matthew Simmonds and William Moore, The Endling takes the format of a revue with short scenes that borrow from music hall, physical theatre and confessional stand-up.

An endling is the last of a species. One sketch imagines the characters visiting a natural history museum as they jokingly give names to the last of each creature in the exhibition. The show moves inevitably from the last animals to the last humans, with much of the blame for ecological disasters falling on mankind’s long history of exploiting the natural world. It sounds grim, but the tone is light, if wistful. One scene focuses in on the colonial mentality of big-game hunters, past and present, as they stand by their quarry – here the actor portraying a stuffed lion on the stage floor, mouth agape, there, an elephant or a bear.

The youthful Simmonds and Moore wear identical costumes as they migrate from animals to hunters, explorers to lecturers. There’s an enjoyable scene mimicking the penguins from Happy Feet 3, the actors worried about the disappearing ice flows that the penguins call home. Our carelessness about the natural world is recorded in a scene where the disappearance of language works as a metaphor: legs are renamed ‘standers’, for example. Another scene becomes a game of ‘guess the animal’ via deliberately vague and simplistic descriptions given by the actors.

Half-way through the play, there’s a jolt back to reality in a meta-theatrical discourse on the ethics of performing this show, asking (despite the evidence of about 70 people in the audience) whether anyone would purchase a ticket about the end of all life on earth. They ask whether anyone noticed that possibly up to three billion animals were killed in Australian wildfires last year. With Extinction Rebellion members invited to the post-show discussion, we got the message.