World Menopause Day Special: Mid Life, the Play

Season 1 • Episode 8
Sheila Chapman, Author

It’s World Menopause Day, so we are celebrating women in midlife and shouting about the menopause in all its glory. Over the past year, the taboo around discussing the menopause has been gradually chipped away, which is encouraging, but there’s very little portrayal of the menopause in the arts, so I’m excited to tell you all about new play called Mid Life which is coming to the Barbican in London in February 2020. We have 2 free tickets to give away, so tune in to find out how you could be the lucky winner.

In this episode, I speak to award-winning author Sheila Chapman who has written a play called Mid Life which charts the experiences of 3 very different women and their journey through the menopause. Dr Isabel de Salis is also joining us remotely and her research project is an important part of the picture. The play aims to bust myths about midlife and the menopause, and Sheila drew on some of the key themes of Isabel’s interviews with menopausal women to develop the script and to give the characters a truly authentic voice. I’m pretty sure you’ll recognise several of the challenges they face, so that you’ll laugh and cry along with them!

Sheila has big ambitions to extend the show and the important messages it contains beyond the theatre to reach a wider audience. She’d like to put on shows for free in community centres, workplaces and libraries, and host discussions which capture the diverse voices of all kinds of different women, which could be incorporated into future iterations of the show and also into a book that will be published next year. If you’d like to support this brilliant work and help Mid Life go on tour, you can make a donation via Sheila’s crowdfunder.

Show Notes

You can find out more about Sheila and the work that she does by visiting her website.

You can also follow Sheila on Twitter.

Here’s a link to a trailer for Mid Life, the play, if you’d like a sneak preview.

And if you’d like to send Mid Life on tour and help it go out to local communities, here’s the link to the Crowdfunder where you can make a donation.

Check out Diverse City who are producing the play and find out more about their great work to support equality and diversity in the arts.

Many of the themes of the play were drawn from Dr Isabel de Salis’s research which has been published in the Journal of Women and Ageing under the title: Experiencing menopause in the UK: The interrelated narratives of normality, distress, and transformation.

Isabel has contributed a chapter called “Reclaiming the Menopause” to the book Ageing, the Body and the Gender Regime: health, Illness and Disease Across the Life Course. 

Competition Time!

To win 2 tickets to see Mid Life at the Barbican in February 2020 here’s what to do:

1. Leave a review of The Happy Menopause Podcast on Apple iTunes
2. Take a picture and share it on social media
3. Tag me in via @WellWellWellUK or share it with me to show you’ve entered
4. The competition closes at midnight on 1^st January 2020

The winner of the tickets will be chosen at random and the result announced on the @WellWellWellUK Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages.  The prize does not include travel expenses or any other costs associated with your trip to the Barbican.

 

Photo © Alexa Ledecky