Dry Season. Canada Water Theatre.

Kat Lyons’ spoken word theatre show Dry Season is a busy concoction of physical theatre, poetry, PowerPoint slides, and animation that explores the Bristol-based writer and performer’s experiences with menopause at the age of 37. As a personal history of the psychological and physical cost of what the performer’s doctors dryly label ‘premature ovarian failure’, the show has bite and dry humour. Lyons’ journey from their initial feelings of confusion and loss, through anger at the random vicissitudes of biological bad luck, to eventual HRT-aided acceptance, is well charted. Opinions will vary as to whether the show has much wider to say about engrained social and medical attitudes towards ageing and gender, but there as an intimate honesty about Dry Season that is hard not to respect.

Lyons is best known as a poet, so perhaps it is unsurprising the show works best in the spoken word elements. It opens with a beautifully written ode to a fairy-tale daughter who is “so beautiful the stars want to touch her”, a girl destined never to face to crushing inevitability of growing old and the associated loss of fertility. Other elegiac sections hint at a relationship destroyed by hormone-driven paranoia, and the difficulties of dealing with a bewildering and sometimes unsympathetic array of medical professionals. There is a clever spoof on the kind of irritatingly banal audio guides to falling asleep that end up making insomnia worse. Lyons can write a dry joke or two: commenting caustically on their decision to take HRT, despite 28 mentions of cancer of the medication information, they comment “I’d rather lose my titties than my mind”.

The show’s elements physical theatre also work well, even if some feel a little too literal. Delivering a comment on how women magically become invisible, post-menopause, is not necessarily aided by dressing up as a magician’s assistant. Delivering lines while doing star jumps is a clunky way of making a point about the tendency of medical professionals to advocate exercise as a cure-all answer to life’s ills.

Where the show is least successful is in its attempt to make a wider point about social attitudes towards menopausal women. The array of medical statistics and symptoms they offer up, and the slide show of the various medical devices that have been inside them, make a stark point about their own dark experiences. How generalisable any of this is to what other women face is debatable.

Writer and Director: Kat Lyons