“I’m ageing by the minute,” says Deirdre O’Kane. But there’s nothing mellow about the opening stages of Demented, which finds her conjuring with that freighted phrase “woman of a certain age”. O’Kane sets out her stall here, trading in acidity and swagger as she jokes about her age-resisting regime and whether she might still lure younger men into bed. The frankness is winning, and carries us over into the meat of the show’s first half, an account of how O’Kane came to acknowledge her menopause (“I’m not just forgetting people – I’ve gone off them”) and seek help with her changing body.
If it’s not quite as wild as Bridget Christie’s recent material on the same theme, the 55-year-old fashions enjoyable standup from her encounters with her well-heeled consultant and her adventures in HRT. OK, so the joke about not recognising her husband lands a bit awkwardly. More sure-footed are the jaundiced remarks about the inverse proportion between her own oestrogen (and collagen) and that of her teenage daughter.
