Fresh from the success of her highly acclaimed show, How to Get The Menopause and Enjoy It, writer, performer and member of musical comedy trio The Nualas, Anne Gildea speaks to The Reviews Hub about its equally hilarious follow-up, Further Adventures in WOMANING’.

We’re meeting at the Two Pups Café on Francis Street, a vibrant thoroughfare full of antique shops in Dublin’s Liberties near to where Gildea lives with her partner, the producer, film director and writer, Paul Farren.

Although the entertainer is five months into her tour, she relates how Further Adventures in WOMANING continues to be a work in progress. In terms of material, herself and Farren, who co-produces and directs, are constantly refining things. “There is a phenomenal amount of detail, imagery and jokes. Each week of the show, every aspect is really thought through, how, for example, things intersect with each other and how they fit into the whole.” Gildea doesn’t typically suffer from nerves but when work is relatively new and she feels that “it’s not in her bones yet”, it can be slightly daunting, especially when a performance runs for two hours, which her theatre style shows do.

But the comedian has “been doing this stuff for years”. Her “body knows how to modulate a long show and how to modulate an audience”. “It’s like guiding a horse. You go out on stage, you pick up the reins and you use a light touch, but you hold those reins absolutely for the entire time.” These last two shows where Gildea gouges every last scrap of humour from the trials and tribulations of midlife are resonating massively with women of all ages. She will often go out and speak with people from the audience after a performance and “finds great joyousness” in seeing grandmothers, mothers, daughters, cousins and friends laughing together and connecting not only with the material but with each other.

There is no doubt that the timing of Gildea’s How To Get The Menopause And Enjoy It was a happy accident, tapping into public sentiment at the time, as it did. In 2022, a five day discussion on Joe Duffy’s RTE 1 Radio Liveline programme exploded into a veritable menopause revolution in Ireland. It led to women feeling they could openly discuss their own personal accounts for the first time.

There was nothing happy about Gildea’s own menopausal journey, however, having had it thrust suddenly upon her as a result of breast cancer treatment in 2011/2012. Her encounter with the disease was “terrifying”, “painful” and “grueling”. She describes fearing “the unknown” and remembers how “your body has to get really sore and worn down”. Throughout her illness, Gildea operated in “survival mode” and continued working. Although she had wonderful support from family and friends, she lived alone at the time and had a mortgage to pay. And as she “never got one red cent for nothing in her life”, she kept on performing with The Nuala’s, writing her weekly column in The Irish Mail on Sunday, and collaborating on the documentary Breast Cancer: No Laughing Matter with Anna Rodgers.

The comedian found she “was processing the experience by writing about it the whole time, and it really helped”. Signing a deal with Hachette Books Ireland saw her biography I’ve Got Cancer, What’s Your Excuse? published in 2013. It is a harrowing but funny and insightful read. This was Gildea’s second book and she plans to add two further chapters and republish it. Her first, a novel, humorously titled, Deadlines and D**ckheads, hit the shelves in 2006.

Although she moved from Manchester to County Sligo at the age of five with her family, Gildea still speaks with the hint of a Mancunian accent. She never wanted to leave their “red-brick semi, on a neighbourly street” in England or “crumpets, coloured polos and her red scooter” but the Irish Government’s Land Commission was threatening compulsory purchase of her father’s farm in Tubbercurry and he was never going to allow that to happen. The author wrote that the small village was “the kind of place you’d describe in terms of its relationship to other places” and “the kind of place where nobody ever said, ‘I love you’- they just implied it, by crying a lot when you died”.

After her Leaving Certificate, Gildea fled the west of Ireland for Communications Studies at Dublin City University, and then from there in 1987, for the bright lights of London where she would scour the media-jobs section of the Guardian newspaper. In the meantime she stuffed envelopes with final notices for British Gas – “Nobody told me the aged were exempted from disconnection in the cold months. Sorry.”

Through various ways and means, Gildea eventually broke into the industry. She participated in drama and improvisation workshops, performed poetry, entertained as a member of her three person theatre company, Doris Karloff and ‘wenched’ in a Medieval Restaurant for £11 per night. She booked non paying open spots in comedy clubs before furiously writing the actual material. At one point Gildea resorted to writing sex telephone messages for the business of an acquaintance she refers to as ‘Mr Devil’.

A high point of the comedian’s seven years in London was winning a scholarship to do a postgraduate acting course at The Academy of Live and Recorded Arts in Wandsworth (ALRA). A low point when she was reduced to living on lentils and oat cakes. There are fond memories of cycling around Elephant and Castle on a bicycle bought for 12 guilders from a junkie in Amsterdam, of gigging with the likes of Eddie Izzard and Jo Brand at The Hard Edge Club in Karl Marx’s old haunt, The Red Lion Pub in Soho, and learning from great gag writers like Harry Hill, but not so fond memories of comedy clubs dominated by men and having to try and fit into a misogynistic and laddish mode of stand-up.

By now, Gildea was “27 years old, broke and living in a squat”. She decided to move back to Dublin where she landed a five month contract working on the Gerry Ryan Tonight Show, recording sketches and doing some interviews. This good fortune continued when she met Sue Collins and Tara Flynn at a party in 1995 and “something had a magic thing about it”. They wrote three songs and started singing together at home and abroad as The Nualas. “It was a brilliant moment in Ireland, the Celtic Tiger was roaring, you had Riverdance and A Woman’s Heart … all these cultural moments. That was my break.”

Today, Gildea is “the happiest she has ever been”. “Paul is amazing, he is my rock. He believes in me so much.” Their partnership has turned her life around, not only personally but professionally. He co-creates the shows and even came up with the title for How to Get The Menopause and Enjoy it. Their running joke at the moment is that the next production, for which they are already brainstorming, should be called Get Your Tits out for The Boys. The entertainer is, ironically, an introvert, and Paul as director, co-ordinator and publicist for the show, interfaces with everyone on her behalf. This allows the comedian to focus on the performance and reserve all of the psychic energy necessary for the stage.

Gildea also credits her relationship with Paul for chasing away the “black mongrel” of depression that had dogged her for years. Although she no longer frets about the cancer returning, she is grappling with a deterioration of her eyesight caused by a detached retina in one eye and a cataract in the other. A botched procedure exacerbating matters has left Gildea feeling angry and worried which is entirely understandable when you consider both of her maternal aunts are blind and her mother’s eyesight has failed considerably.

I mention retirement and Gildea laughs. She “will pop her clogs on stage”. The comedy scene is too exciting right now. Especially for women. She refers to Leanne Morgan, a Texan mother and grandmother from a rural town who has an incredible persona and has brilliantly captured the zeitgeist of America. Foil Arms and Hog have her deep respect for the drive and commitment that have made them the top Irish comedy act internationally. She is not familiar with all of the younger comics coming onstream but is interested in attending some of their gigs to “check out what’s current and see how stuff lands”.

“No, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m meant to be and it’s like everything I’ve ever done is kind of coming together.” “But I’ve been around long enough to know you don’t take anything for granted, so I will still work. Every day. You just keep it going, right?” And in passing along some wisdom from American comedian, Maria Bamford, to stand-up newbies, Gildea says to just “do the work…and do it, and do it, and do it, and do it.”

Before we part ways I ask if she has ever considered anything other than city living. It seems as if it is the writer responding when she admits that she has thought about being near the sea or perhaps somewhere quiet and peaceful in the countryside. But I’m guessing the idyll Gildea is imagining behind the wistful and faraway look in her eyes is not Tubbercurry.

Further Adventures in WOMANING runs in venues around Ireland until December 5th, 2025.