Writer: Anne Gildea
Director: Paul Farren
There is an excited buzz in the theatre at the Solstice Arts Centre as we take our seats. It’s Saturday evening and everyone is in good form and looking forward to Anne Gildea’s new show, Further Adventures in WOMANING. Given the snatches of conversation overheard from the groups of women present, it appears that most have seen the show’s precursor, How To Get the Menopause and Enjoy it and loved it.
“The one and possibly only” Anne Gildea arrives on stage to loud applause and the strains of Joe Dolan’s “You’re such a good looking woman”. From the off she is engaging with the audience. A 27 year old from Navan in the front row is thanked for “coming such a long way” and told she is “going to learn a thing or two tonight”. The comedian is disappointed that there are no men in the room because “when there is one fella in, we sacrifice him”.
We learn that while Gildea’s mother and father were from Westport and Tubbercurry respectively, they met, married and started their family in Manchester. It was in the 1970’s that the five year old was wrenched from the cosmopolitan mecca to return home to their small farm in County Sligo. It was bleak. “You’d open the front door and as far as the eye could see, there were alcoholics.” Her Mam, who is in her nineties and “has a blackbelt in the rosary”, is back living in Manchester. Gildea and her sister, Una, tossed a coin recently to see who should go over to visit her. She won so her sister went.
Gildea has to mind Una’s dog while she is away. She can’t understand why she is not allowed to give him cheap dog food when “this is the lad that spends the day licking his hole”. The story about a Spanish chap she encounters at the pet healthcare store, with his rabbit, Fluffy, is absolutely hilarious but she isn’t sure she should be telling it, as mimicking his accent might be racist. It’s a minefield. Her own mother pauses before uttering the words ‘black pudding’ in case she should be saying ‘pudding of colour’.
We are transported back to when the Gildea household would gather around the black and white “telly”. There was just one channel, RTE 1, from 4pm to 12 midnight. While the family watched every programme back to back, including the Angeles and News for the Deaf, the adverts were the greatest source of entertainment. Gildea recalls the romance of the Milk Tray man and the lengths he would go to in order to deliver his chocolates. The reality of a man in black, wearing a balaclava and turning up in your bedroom in Ireland would be a whole different vibe. This she says in a northern Irish accent. The girl in the Flake ad looked like “she could have done with a post-coital cigarette after munching down on” her bar. And “you didn’t so much as wear” the 18 hour girdle as “you were incarcerated in it”.
The show is so inclusive and companionable that we all sing along to the jingles; “Now hands that do dishes can be soft as your face”…, “A Mars a day”…, “Everyone’s a fruit and nutcase”…, “Just one cornetto”…. We are reminded of Gildea’s considerable singing talent when she goes full opera on the last one.
While the gags keep coming, so much so, there are tears streaming down our faces, there is a strong message in Gildea’s show. Our mothers and grandmothers have had to fight very hard for the rights we and our daughters enjoy so liberally now. We are reminded that the Marriage Bar, which required women in certain jobs to leave their employment upon marrying, was only abolished in 1973. For tax purposes they had then been identified by their husband’s PPS number with a ‘W’ on the end. The Domicile Act abolishing the old common law rule wherein the domicile of a married woman is deemed to be the same as that of her husband, only came to pass as recently as 1986. And, of course, The Family Law (Divorce) Act, was introduced into Law in 1996. We owe a substantial debt to the various women’s groups such as the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, the Irish Housewives Association and the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement for their tireless campaigning.
So while we laugh uproariously at sketches of our mammies with the twin tub washing machines, at male notions of them getting their exercise in by trotting to the shops for the groceries and it being a mortal sin to have sex before marriage, we bear in mind the danger the likes of Nell McCafferty and her fellow activists knowingly put themselves in, by taking the “contraceptive train” to Belfast to bring back ‘the pill’ and condoms illegally.
Gildea’s style is conversational. There is an authentic and constant dialogue with the audience and so a warm and convivial camaraderie cloaks us. The performer is so at ease on the stage, she might just as easily have been in her own kitchen. She holds us in the palm of her hand. Her “fella”, director, writer and producer, Paul Farren, is the third person in our relationship. He tells her not to say she struggles to lose weight but that “she has a propensity to gain it because then it sounds like an achievement”. He doesn’t want to have a seaweed wrap at the Spa Hotel the same as he wouldn’t rub shite all over his face and body. Theirs is a highly successful collaboration on every level.
If you’re looking for a great night out with laughter, song, kinship, twerking and much, much more, then Further Adventures in WOMANING is the show for you. Just make sure you’re “wearing clean knickers in case you get hit by a bus” enroute.
Reviewed 31st May 2025.
