Hot flush, or hot topic? For centuries, half the world has navigated this transition in silence. Now Mariella Frostrup is here to crack it wide open.
Cracking the Menopause is the live event that finally gives voice to what's been whispered about, hidden away, and catastrophically misunderstood for far too long.
This isn't a medical show. This is something far more radical: a collective reckoning with the extraordinary, infuriating, and darkly hilarious history of menopause itself.
Co-written with journalist Alice Smellie, broadcaster and author Mariella Frostrup, alongside special guest actors, will take you on a journey through time and testimony. Through stunning performances of real words written by real women across the ages, discover how we got here: from medieval "wandering wombs" to Victorian hysteria, from forced institutionalisation to modern-day gaslighting in the doctor's surgery.
These aren't just stories. They're battle cries. Love letters. Confessions. Each account— historical and contemporary—reveals the shocking truth about a universal experience that has been deliberately erased, pathologised, and silenced.
"We are not overheating or inherently cold, we are not hysterics or boiling vats of toxic poisons, we are not dried up or washed up—we are simply menopausal."
Expect to laugh until you cry. Expect to cry until you laugh. Expect to feel the electric charge of recognition when someone finally speaks your truth out loud. This is menopause reclaimed—raw, and strangely, gloriously—hopeful.
An unmissable show for anyone who’s been through it, is going through it, or loves someone who is.
Mariella will be joined by Ateh Jewel in London and Bath, and Gina Bellman in Bury St Edmunds.
