Kerry Godliman: Bandwidth Review – After Life Star in Gorgeous Spleen Form | comedy

TSpeaking of hot flashes: Menopause and pre-menopause have in a short time gone from being “the great unmentionable” to a favorite subject of midlife female comics. Following Bridget Christie, whose treatment of the subject evolved into a hit TV series, and Desiree Burch’s middle-aged heartfelt cry on this year’s Fringe, Kerry Godliman comes with her own take on the hormonal chaos and entering “hag territory.” If its subject no longer arrives with the shock of the new, Bandwidth is marked by the vivid energy of its creator, who explodes with impotent rage as her youth, courage and most of her self-respect pass into a hazy memory.

If the show is somewhat about age, it’s certainly not about softness. The After Life star is ratcheting up the rage here, albeit the rage of the less threatening kind: apoplectic, her outbursts repeating ever-louder until they end in a whimper. So it is in one routine of forcing us to surrender all our thoughts to social media, and the other to vent in pharmacies where stocks of HRT drugs run out. Lost in a changing body in a changing world, “listening to true crime podcasts under a weighted blanket,” and adding to Godelman’s confusion is the “ghost of my former self,” her 18-year-old daughter and her husband unable to distinguish between his wife’s underwear and his child’s underwear.

There’s nothing new in the Londoner’s material about these assorted domestic indignities, but gosh, she brings familiar familial exasperation to lively life in routine after routine, animated by a keen sense of their absurdity, and some memorable one-liners. (Spleen to her daughter: “You’re lucky you have a neck!”)

Elsewhere, as if proof of her loss of perspective were needed, she blames Saint David Attenborough for the climate crisis (“Disaster seems to be following this guy”) and finds a new kind of happiness in gardening and knitting Instagram content. Should such a shift be resisted or celebrated? Bandwidth finds Godliman suspended between the two, twisted not in the wind but in the storm of our laughter.