Writer: Melissa Ainsworth
Director: Meggie Greivell
Melissa Ainsworth’s The End is Near certainly has noble ambitions. Three women from three different time periods have been incarcerated for their beliefs. Scottish Janet, played by Lisa McIntyre, is awaiting death for alleged witchcraft. Caroline, a suffragette in 1911, played by Ainsworth herself, is suffering the indignity of being force-fed. The setting for American Lauren (Chloe Johnson), the third woman, is the near future – 2028. She’s been imprisoned for having had an illegal abortion following a rape.
Ainsworth’s evident aim as playwright is to explore the continuities in women’s rights across time. Indeed, time itself is repeatedly invoked, each of the characters chanting ‘Tick! Tick!’ in a sinister and – to be honest – tiresome fashion. For most of the play, the three characters sometimes act as an ensemble, singing or chanting together. But the characters themselves are locked in their own worlds. Each is given fragments of monologue, but there is a disappointing lack of detailed characterisation.
Janet in 1661 supposedly works in her father’s shop. But what sort of shop? And how likely is this occupation at the time? More startlingly ahistorical is Janet’s professed wish to travel and see the world. It doesn’t feel as if Ainsworth has thought through the realities of mid-seventeenth-century life, particularly mid-seventeenth-century life in Scotland. The era of the Grand Tour is a long way off, and even then, only the wealthiest and most aristocratic of women could hope to travel. Janet has apparently been deceived by a lover. But quite why she has been accused of witchcraft is unclear. We’d need to know about her community and its religious beliefs to make this credible. You can’t really just rely on Arthur Miller to do the job for you.
Caroline’s background, which should be easier to sketch in, is similarly lacking in the sort of granular detail that brings a character alive. And where are her fellow militants? For all her lusty singing of Ethel Smyth’s The March of the Women, she gives very little sense of this being an active movement rather than her personal crusade. Nor is it clear why she’s being kept in prison.
Where Caroline is presented as perpetually cheery, Lauren is perpetually sweary. She’s in Washington, DC, but has a wife and daughter in England. This begs the question of why she didn’t simply follow them there and have the abortion legally on the NHS.
The last quarter of the play suddenly goes all magic realism. The action at this stage becomes chaotic, as the three women find they can talk to each other and profess surprise at one another’s differences – cue some rather strained banter, at odds with the play’s earnest didacticism.
Runs until 13 September 2025
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
-
4
1 Comment
Well actually it was common for women to be shopkeepers in Edinburgh in the 17th century, particularly in clothing, cloth production and textiles. Some of the most well known cases of women accused of witchcraft, particularly in Edinburgh were shopkeepers. (Which by the way Janet mentions several times in the play that it’s a fabric shop.) Edinburgh was also a Merchant town at this time, so Janet’s lifestyle was actually very accurately described, and she most likely would have come across many different kinds of people working as a merchant. Her character dreams of traveling, she does not travel so your comment makes no sense. Your argument that the playwright did not do her research is unjustified . In terms of the audiences not “understanding” why she was accused and having to know Arthur Miller is another unwarranted remark. First of all, The Crucible is not even really about the Salem witch trials, it’s about McCarthyism and scapegoating and the whole play centers around a man. Second of all, in the last 5 years there has been well known political campaigns in Scotland on raising recognition and pardoning the nearly 4,000 women accused in the 17th century. Similarly in the United States much work has been done recently on pardoning women accused of witchcraft in the New England witch trials. So people do indeed know about the witch trials and I don’t think most audiences who would attend this production would be that ignorant. Finally, the reason she was accused could be any number of things and that is left up to the audience because the fact is that women were accused for no reason at all. The suffragettes were arrested for militant protesting, one thing they liked to do was chain themselves to fences, which again Caroline’s character does explain all of this….