Desiree Burch is 46. For most comedians, this is the time to deliver your mildly grumpy show about middle age: the bodily decay; the annoying habits of the generation coming up behind you. That all features in The Golden Wrath, but it’s ratcheted up to the nth degree. For Burch, middle age isn’t a mild development, it’s a cataclysm. The perimenopause apparently has 66 separate symptoms, and Burch’s mind and body are weathering not a slow decline but an all-out attack. All-out attack is Burch’s performance style too, in a show that hurls at us her experience of hormonal female midlife.
It’s a blast – because our host is a charismatic, bombastic stage presence, and because she textures the comedy of ageing with moral indignation alongside the physical indignity. Burch sets the scene by placing herself generationally, holding up her own gen X experience (“we walked so you could run”) against those of the boomers, millennials and gen Z’s in the room. This isn’t always novel (“Do you guys remember the rotary phone?”), but it’s playful and relatable, skilfully softening us up for the onslaught to come.
