Sara Pascoe's new play The Endings; and is euthanasia suitable for comedy?

Alice Jones' Arts Diary

Sara Pascoe performing in her third Edinburgh show.

She is best known as the dozy “Trend Analyst” Coco Lomax in Twenty Twelve and for her stand-up, but Sara Pascoe also moonlights as a playwright.

Her latest short, The Endings, premieres at Theatre 503 in Battersea this weekend as part of XY, two days of dramas which have all been written without specifying the gender of their characters. Inspired by the death of her “overbearing” grandmother, The Endings is set in the aftermath of a funeral where all is not what it seems.

“My mum and her sisters were all brought up by a very overbearing mother”, she says. “They’re all still reliving what happened to them in their childhood.”

Pascoe, 31, a graduate of Soho Theatre’s playwriting course, will also bring her one-woman piece, Emily’s Very Sad Play, to Camden People’s Theatre next year. “It’s an unreliable narrator piece about women’s mental health”, she says. “A lot of my peers are more interested in writing for television but I’d much rather write for theatre. It’s almost like doing stand-up.”

In the meantime, she has already started work on an “existential” new stand-up show for next year’s Edinburgh Fringe. “It’s about subjectivity and how two things can be true at once. But in the end it will probably just boil down to what’s actually funny.”

Euthanasia comedy

Who says assisted suicide can’t be funny? Not BBC3.

The channel has commissioned a six-part sitcom about three friends who, by a chain of hilarious events, find themselves setting up a euthanasia service.

Way to Go is by the American writer, Bob Kushell, who has previously written for The Simpsons and Anger Management and will star Blake Harrison, better known as The Inbetweeners’ dopey Neil.

“It treats its serious subject in the same way that 'Arsenic And Old Lace' dealt with old lady poisoners or 'Kind Hearts And Coronets' dealt with aristocratic murders”, according to executive producer Jon Plowman. 

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