Reviews

'Virginia Ironside in The Virginia Monologues – Why It’s Great To Be Sixty, The Studio, York Theatre Royal. Judging by the demographic of the audience at Virginia Ironside’s delightful stand-up show on Tuesday and Wednesday, you would assume that the target market is lodged firmly within her own age-range: sixty-something. But, thankfully, you would be wrong.
Starting off her career as a journalist and then finding her true home as a sympathetic yet candid agony aunt, Ironside knows how to build a seamless sense of nostalgia with her endless, endearing anecdotes of old age. From sex and drugs, to gardening and dozing, Ironside has done it all; and it has all left her so remarkably indifferent.
Nigel Planer’s direction allows Ironside to talk of death and illness with a well-orchestrated sense of poignancy, and also develops a clever pacing of froth and morbidity in swift one-line swoops. Ironside’s gentle South Kensington purr allows her occasional swearing and cringe-inducing gags about using Vaseline as lubricant to evade any offensive overtones.
Her tales of friends who use cruises as “floating nursing houses”, and guidance about how one should not wear spectacles with strings attached because “they make you look deaf”, are amusing and accessible for all age ranges.
Ironside isn’t fooling anyone, however. Looking positively glowing and robust in her chic hot-pink dress and a pair of spectacles that certainly don’t have strings attached, Ms Ironside looks like she could relive the rock’n’roll dizziness of her twenties, write a well-considered advice column and reinvent the architecture of her doubtlessly funky yet flawless garden in just one afternoon – without so much as a quick doze in sight.
It almost makes me look forward to the fun of being great at sixty, just like the indispensible Ms Ironside herself. Minus the bunions, perhaps.'
York Press