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Talk about a hot flush: menopause, and its peri-predecessor, have gone in no time from being The Great Unmentionable to a favoured subject of middle-aged female comics. After Bridget Christie, whose treatment of the topic evolved into a hit TV series, and Desiree Burch’s midlife cri de coeur at this year’s fringe, here comes Kerry Godliman with her own take on hormonal chaos and entering “the crone zone”. If its subject matter no longer arrives with the shock of the new, Bandwidth is distinguished by the live-wire energy of its creator, erupting with impotent fury as her youth, sangfroid and most of her self-respect pass into foggy memory.
If the show is to some degree about age, it’s certainly not about mellowing. The After Life star ratchets up the rage here, albeit rage of the least threatening variety: a pipsqueak apoplexy, her outbursts repeating in an ever-higher voice until they expire in whimpers. So goes one routine about our compulsion to confide our every thought to social media, and another venting at the pharmacies where her HRT drugs are out of stock. Adrift in a changing body in a changing world, “listening to true crime podcasts underneath a weighted blanket”, Godliman’s disorientation is augmented by her “ghost of my former self” 18-year-old daughter and a husband unable to distinguish between his wife’s and his child’s underwear.
There’s nothing novel about the Londoner’s material on these various domestic indignities, but, goodness me, she brings familiar family peeves to vivid life in routine after routine, animated by a sharp sense of her own absurdity, and some memorable phraseology. (Splenetic, to her daughter: “You’re lucky to have a neck!”)
Elsewhere, as if proof were needed of her loss of perspective, she blames the sainted David Attenborough for the climate crisis (“catastrophe seems to follow that bloke around”) and finds a new kind of happiness in horticulture and knitting content on Instagram. Should such a transformation be resisted, or celebrated? Bandwidth finds Godliman suspended between the two, twisting not in the wind but in the gales of our laughter.
