Yoga and Sex for Women (Over 40) – Hens and Chickens, London

Writer: Kathryn Haywood

Director: Dan Mersh

Yoga and Sex for Women (over 40) is 50 minutes of sheer delight. Kath (Kathryn Haywood) is a bright-eyed Australian yoga teacher. We first meet her descending, reasonably gracefully, from a headstand – ‘and breathe’. It’s the end of a class of Yoga for Flatulence. We’re next up.

Kath has some cue cards, which she tends to muddle up, and three books from the 1960s: Yoga for Women, Yoga Over Forty and Sex and Yoga. Her much-thumbed copies are packed with post-it notes. She keeps riffling through to find a passage she feels she needs to share. But her phone keeps pinging. Her latest date is messaging: meet at Waterloo under the clock. Messages zip back and forth while Kath overshares details of her recent dates.

Best of all, as audience members, we somehow find ourselves wanting to join in. Haywood is effortlessly funny. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Angela’. ‘Right, Andrea – what I need you to do is …’. The joke works every time, the audience more than happy to be picked on, confident we won’t be asked to do anything really awful. We find ourselves cheerfully joining in with her mantra: ‘I won’t let myself grow old!’

At some stage, she tries to read out directions from the Kama Sutra, getting hopelessly bogged down trying to orientate herself beside yet another willing audience member.

Haywood’s timing is pitch perfect, her expressive face like an Australian Fleabag

You laugh and laugh and it’s all over too quickly.

Brilliant

Reviewed on 15 November 2023