“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.
The gig swerves after that towards more nostalgic material about our host’s 1980s upbringing. The reason for the change of tack isn’t clear – even while something interesting is promised by a buildup referencing Ireland’s then-tanking economy and her family’s plunge into (relative) poverty. But that theme isn’t developed, and the material we get instead (about her taciturn dad and her compatriots’ aversion to sunglasses) is unremarkable. A later section about her mother today, “deaf in one ear and doesn’t listen in the other”, babbling semi-comprehensibly on the phone to Deirdre, is similarly likable but unexceptional. To trade profitably in the comedy of parental eccentricity, the eccentricity must be more distinctive than this.
O’Kane keeps it engaging, though, before pivoting to a tale of hair-raising goings-on on a recent visit to Gaza with Comic Relief. It’s a balancing act, that one, given all the things we have to ignore to enjoy her story about the experiences of a visiting dignitary at border control. She pulls it off, just, in a show that finds the Irishwoman ageing but only occasionally dimmed.
At Soho theatre, London, until 22 July
