Countess Dracula is a daring new piece featuring Joanna Holden (Told by an Idiot, Cirque du Soleil) and Jack Kelly. Through the figure of the Countess, it explores the lived experience of menopause with humour, honesty and theatrical flair. Blending horror, satire and love story, it challenges how society views ageing women.
Joanna Holden is a highly regarded performer with over twenty-five years of experience as an actor, director and clown. Born in Scunthorpe, she has worked worldwide while staying true to her northern roots. She has collaborated with Told By An Idiot, John Wright and leading directors including Roxana Silbert and Stephen Daldry, performing with companies such as Cirque du Soleil, Kneehigh, The RSC and The National Theatre here she shares openly her own lived experience of the menopause and how it led to a collaboration with Jack Kelly and OffTheJackall to create Countess Dracula.
Everyone experiences the menopause differently and I’m sure different cultures view this milestone, this transition, this change also very differently. My sister sailed through it and I have found it confusing, saddening, baffling, a complete tipping upside down and inside out, a madness, and alongside that feelings of grief and depression as well as a liberation, an anarchism of not having to be compliant, to fit a mould that not only society gave me but a mould I continually tried to squeeze myself into.
I met a neighbour in the street, we asked how each other were. She whispered in the shadows of the hedge, “I’m exhausted, no libido but neither has he,” nodding towards her front door, “but I’m not one of those angry ones.” I nodded in recognition, and we both said in unison, “God it’s awful.” We hugged and went into our houses. My other friend refuses to talk about it and won’t meet me for coffee if I’m going to mention it. We’re all different, aren’t we, and I can only share from my own experience. I guess it’s hard to show weakness and disclose that you’re struggling in a world full of images of success, people getting on with things, and in the workplace where you’ve got to be at the top of your game or are easily replaced. There’s always a mental health poster at work, but you’ve got to be very brave to ask for help.
It’s funny, I studied clown, and we talk a lot about failure and the comedy that comes from that vulnerability of being in the moment but worrying about your lines on stage, opening your mouth and strange words coming out, not remembering if you’ve just done that scene or was that the matinee. This kind of failure feels frightening, well to me at least. Whilst you’re in it, it can affect everything. When everyday conversation becomes a game of charades, it’s easy to start dropping out. It’s called “the change” because you are, at least I am, changed, and that takes some getting used to. It’s a sense of rediscovering yourself. In a capitalist world it’s hard to be vulnerable, yet this transition is inevitable, and we are living longer, and it needs to be given space and understanding.
The idea for our show Countess Dracula came from a moment on the tube. Whilst contemplating my lack of libido and wondering whether that version of myself as a sexual being had given up the ghost, I glanced over at a young crowd and fantasised about sucking their blood, just a small bite for their testosterone to give me energy and vitality and the power that I had felt as a sexual being, even if that was as simple as being served in a bar. Sadly, on that same tube journey I became obsessed with pert bottoms and young skin. I thought I wouldn’t be so bothered about ageing and my appearance, but I envied these jiggling distractions. I never appreciated it when I had my own. We sometimes don’t notice things until they’re gone.
This led me to chat with Jack, my co-conspirator, about working on a show drawing comparisons between the menopause and Dracula. I started to think, can I only exist in this world as a sexual being? I had friends on HRT saying they couldn’t get enough of it. I didn’t feel that, even though I thought I was supposed to, and I wrestle even now as I sit in the Boy George camp, I’d rather have a cup of tea. I still can’t decide if I’m missing out or just not bothered about all that anymore, and the thought seems somehow absurd, but each to their own. I shall continue with oestrogen pessaries for my poor apparently atrophied nether regions and you never know.
I found a craving to be who I once was. I said to a friend, I want to go back to the drinking, fun-loving, witty woman I once was, the woman without worry. My friend did gently ask me, when was that? But joking aside there is a sense of losing myself. We ran some workshops with menopausal women and one woman described seeing herself from the outside, sat at a table chopping vegetables, and she didn’t know who that woman was anymore. I completely understood how she felt. “I can’t come out tonight, I’ve got to get up tomorrow.” Argh, when I used to get in at 3am and leave at 7am for work.
I’ve discovered for me it’s not about going back to who I thought I was, but to enjoy discovering who I am now. We are many different people in our lives, different chapters. We have partners that may come and go, but in that moment when we are together we think this is forever, and then it’s not, and a new chapter begins. There’s realism and poetry in “nothing stays the same,” and I’m embracing that and letting myself off the hook to be me, sat in my pyjamas with fading eyebrows and the odd witchy hair (that I do hastily pluck) and enjoying what the world has to offer. These transitions are a great time to rethink and reassess, as much as you can, what you’d like to happen next. In Countess Dracula I’d like the horror, the rage, the need to survive to inform my next chapter and hopefully help other women and the people around them understand.
For me I feel so lucky to have been able to explore this creatively. It’s been fun, it’s been hard and sometimes I want to run away, but there’s nothing like a deadline and a venue booked to embrace the “here we go, let’s do it” and see what happens, because what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll forget my lines, I’ll carry on, and something will happen. The change is as good as a rest.
