Riot Women, Sally Wainwright’s hotly awaited new drama, will be billed as a menopause show, and that’s fine – a show can be proud of such a shorthand in 2025, and besides, there’s a lot of menopause in it. Lorraine Ashbourne stars as Jess, a smart-mouthed pub landlady, leading her best life (house full of grown kids and grandkids, a boyfriend who does literally everything she says. “I have, in Jerry, written a weak man,” says Wainwright, contemplatively, as if it’s the first time that’s ever happened. “But he’s very likable”).
Nonetheless, Jess is overwhelmed – like all of us – by the state of the world, and decides to start a rock band for a refugee fundraiser. She needs bandmates, naturally, so enter Tamsin Greig as Holly, a retiring police officer, Joanna Scanlan as Beth, a ground-down teacher and Amelia Bullmore as Yvonne, a midwife with a stick up her arse. They’re joined by Rosalie Craig as Kitty, a very hard-living shoplifter, significantly younger than the others – she’s late 30s/early 40s in this role, the others are all mid-to-late 50s – but also menopausal. Her USP is incredible charisma and a stunning voice, belted out at pub karaoke with vivacious rage, when she isn’t drinking neat vodka straight from the bottle or vandalising cars.
Riot Women, the band, come together at once – the show starts off with the energy of a one-last-heist drama. They’re planning to do an Abba cover, until Beth rebels. She’s absolutely done with being nice. She’s been a competent pianist, accompanying school choirs all her life; she wants their music to express what they’re actually feeling. The songs they end up with – composed for the show by indie-punk two-piece ARXX – land in the bit of the Venn diagram where punk meets the menopause: an absolutely uncompromising “fuck you”.
Hands in the air … (from left) Amelia Bullmore, Rosalie Craig and Tamsin Greig in Riot Women. Photograph: BBC/Drama Republic Ltd
No question, this is an unflinching look at the realities of the Change (sorry, I still love the euphemism – it sounds so satanic). Its plotlines include Kitty having a hot flush while she’s being arrested for wreaking havoc in a supermarket. Yet Riot Women is also about ageing parents, dealing with dementia, workplaces that have changed their sensitivities but only for some people, the long arc of feminism and who got screwed by it, plus adult children and why they are a pain in the neck.
It’s also about music: the entire cast learned their instruments, some from scratch. The battles over their setlist drive a lot of the drama. The unlikely relationships, especially that between compliant Beth and delinquent Kitty, are forged at the keyboard. They all learned separately before a studio date where they had to get together and perform as a band. Because they’re playing their own instruments, the songs were written to reflect both their gutsy mood and their technical rustiness. Bullmore remembers: “Even when you can’t play, it still sounds so good. We had this date we were working towards … I can’t remember a date looming as big since having a baby!”
“Riot Women is about women, at a certain age, when menopause is one of the things that’s happening to you,” says Wainwright. “But you’re dealing with a lot that you didn’t see coming, or that you knew was coming and you’d chosen to ignore. I wanted to find a way to talk about it that was energising and uplifting and offered a solution. For me, it started when my mum developed dementia. I was menopausal; I started to feel invisible.” I raise an eyebrow at this – it was peak Gentleman Jack, she had a global fanbase, I interviewed her back then and she looked magnificently visible. But that’s not how it felt: “You know, your career’s big and you’re pulled in a lot of directions, and in the middle of all that, I was turning into this little old lady.”
The show opens with Beth about to take her own life, under the pressure of a mother with dementia and an entirely unfeeling brother and boss. Wainwright says, understatedly, that when she started writing it, “I was quite low. And I wanted that journey, of two women who’ve reached the same point. Because Kitty’s trying to kill herself [through vodka] as well, in a more flamboyant way. Beth’s going out with a whimper and Kitty’s going out with a bang. I wanted to start with two women who are really low, and allow them to find something they never imagined was going to happen.” I suggest to Wainwright that Kitty is a bit of an idealised portrait of addiction – because alcoholics, in real life, tend not to be so charismatic. She simply smiles enigmatically at this, but Craig says later, “Sally would always say: ‘I don’t think Kitty is an addict. I just think that she’s self-medicating.’ She always fought Kitty’s corner.”
Scanlan is such a fascinating actor – you feel what she’s feeling even in the most slapstick moments of The Thick of It – and here there’s a scene at the secondary school, where she discloses that she’s considered suicide, and her boss brushes her off because he’s reprimanding her for speaking sharply to a colleague, that I still feel vividly indignant about. “When I wrote that scene,” Wainwright remembers, “the women I was working with all had similar anecdotes: you’d been in a situation where you’d said something you didn’t realise was wrong, but at the same time, nobody’s looking out for your mental health, as you’re accused of upsetting someone else’s.” The older woman as someone who can be asked to do everything but whose needs never have to be considered – a beast of burden, if you like – is in large part what all these characters are rebelling against.
Scanlan says: “It’s specific to our generation of women. Punk came along in 1976 but it was probably 77 or 78 before it got to a girls’ boarding school in north Wales. I had this drama teacher, Jan Morris, handing me a copy of [feminist magazine] Spare Rib and encouraging me to stuff a sponge up my vagina instead of using Tampax. A generation of women were liberated by 70s feminism, which was then completely and utterly suppressed by the feminism that happened during the Thatcher years.”
Those broad social expectations – that you had to be liberated one way one minute, then unburn your bra and comply to a different kind of liberation the next – have been mirrored, naturally, in menopause discourse, so that it was “a shameful word until very recently,” Scanlan says, “and then it was expressed as a crisis. You’re [talked about as] a survivor. That’s not my experience of growing older. The wisdom-of-the-crone idea I find rather appealing.”
It has been a mountain to climb, says Greig, in the creative industries as much as anywhere else. “The conversation is only moved on by you moving it on, bit by bit. I was working on a job, it was one of those really hot days, and it was unbearable. Nobody was saying anything. And of course, with my menopause head on, I was getting hotter and hotter, then flushes, then the brain fog, and then I had to remember the lines, and I just said: ‘No, it’s actually impossible to do this.’ And people said: ‘Yeah, it’s hot isn’t it?’ and I had to say: ‘Yes it is hot, but for a menopausal woman, being this hot means that I cannot do my job.’” Greig doing an impression of herself, yelling at you, is comically endearing – nothing like the stock image of menopausal rage, because (newsflash) life isn’t.
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Stick shift … Lorraine Ashbourne in Riot Women Photograph: BBC/Drama Republic/Helen Williams
Probably the harshest characters are the young adult offspring of the band, who are so selfish that it’s quite an unusual portrait of the family unit. “Well, that’s how it is,” Wainwright says briskly, before adding, “not that that applies to my kids.” (Everyone adds this caveat; it’s sweet.)
When Wainwright started writing Riot Women, she wasn’t on HRT “because I’m just one of those people who thinks you shouldn’t take drugs”, she says, wryly. As part of her research, she spoke to Louise Newson, the doctor who’s really raised the profile of hormone treatment, “and she said: ‘Tell me something about your life, your mum.’ I said: ‘She’s got dementia, she’s got osteoporosis.’ And she said: ‘That’s two reasons why you should be on HRT already.’”
Riot Women isn’t all about hormones, except in so far as life is; and the ensemble is so strong there’s no real main character, apart from, in a way, the punk band itself. While the show is “a rallying call for women to fight for visibility”, as Ashbourne says, the music serves “to reignite their passion. Riot Women reminds us that joy isn’t something we outgrow … and it’s something worth fighting for.”
Riot Women starts on 12 October on BBC One at 9pm.
