...The End. A blog about ending plays and how people do it. (May Contain Spoliers)

The End of a play can be a crucial element to the success of a play, musical or other piece of performance art. So what goes into making a 'perfect' ending...and along those lines, what is one? As I write my own plays I will start off with some personal opinion. I often find the hardest part of a play to write is the ending (or alternatively the beginning). It has to tie up the ends of the plot, yet not be some form of cheesy conclusion that merely states the results of the play. For instance the recent production of Exit The King at the Malthouse directed by Neil Armfield had an incredibly powerful ending that was both incredibly interesting and allowed for the plot to be ended quite sufficiently. An ending, I believe, should still entice the audience, not make them realise that they'll be out of the theatre soon. Climax throughout a play is of course an incredibly important dramatic element and an ending should utilize the climax built with some form of major climax, and then a denouement so the audience gets an insight into what occurs after the event. The denouement does even hold the power to be quite gripping and powerful even though it is just showing off the events of 'what happened next'. Miss Saigon's ending, I thought, lacked this denouement and in all, though the ending was pretty powerful, I thought to myself after of ways that I would have made the ending even more effective. When thinking of endings and 'interesting' ways of doing them I think of Shakespeare. Shakespeare reminds me then of death...now of course a classic tragedy involves death, but is killing off everyone at the end of your script 'overkill'? I love reading and studying Shakespeare, and I have by no means read even half of his work, but I find that his great work is often diminished by his endings where instead of finding a 'we can work it out' setting the main characters just seem to die off. Shakespeare seems so fluent in his word skills, that instead of promoting a violent end his characters could have come together and discussed differences, (in a very wordy fashion!) I believe Shakespeare would have been able to pull this off. However I do realise this is probably a very mo0dern view, not taking into account the fact that some audience members were there only for the 'death scenes' and that it was more like his time (and classic tragedy genre) to end a play in such a way. Taking a look at 'The Bald Prima Donna' another type of ending arises...that of replaying the start of the show! A non-naturalistic element- so does the ending have to end? Or can the ending really be the beginning? (Is this what Andrew Lloyd Webber is thinking of in terms of 'Phantom Of The Opera 2'? Is this form of ending successful? I am unsure, as I have never seen an ending like this performed I find this one hard to judge. I believe if utilised effectively it could be an intriuging piece of theatre, however misused and it could turn out terribly. Flashbacks and flashforwards are now another thing that springs to mind. How about a play that starts at a time, flashes back and then flashes forward again to the original time- I have performed in a few plays like this in drama while experimenting with these techniques. The challenge here I guess is that two endings need to be created, a suffienct ending for the flash back, and then some form of ending for the future time as well! Is it ok to 'just wake up'. Something that bugs me about endings is the wake up factor. Where someone wakes up and it was all a dream. I try to steer very clear from these endings as I dislike the idea of what I saw being jsut a dream. Explorations of the imagination on stage in my eye do not need this wake up factor. I believe the stage can be utilised to create worlds where inanimate objects are alive, where mysterious fantastical creatues live and breathe and where the world is vastly different to our own- it's so we can explore. Why explore if we will only then wake up in the 'same old world' again. (Saying this though...my drama ensemble has an ending like this!) So what does constitute a good ending? What does everyone else think about what makes a good ending. Is the ending possibly the most important part of a play.In modern times of experimental theatre, is it necessary for a play to end...or can it leave an ending up to the audience to question and think about the show they have witnessed. What do you think? ...The End