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.

GILDED BALLOON TEVIOT (VENUE 14)
RESPLENDENT in Vivienne Westwood, sixty-something agony aunt Virginia Ironside has come to the Fringe to share her thoughts on getting old.

In her younger years she interviewed the Rolling Stones, Hendrix and Joplin and had her fair share of sex and drugs. “I was cool,” she says. Now bird tables, gardening and playing with her grandson in the park are more her kind of thing.

Her mission is to celebrate the advantages of losing your memory, lowering your expectations and taking frequent naps. But she also has some useful and subversive suggestions about the kind of bad behaviour you can get away with in old age.

Ironside speaks with the kind of clipped English accent you rarely hear these days. She has a wry smile and a delicious twinkle in her eye. As you might expect from a problem page writer, she is not afraid to tackle difficult subjects – including embarrassing illnesses, funerals and geriatric sex. But the whole thing remains about as far from the modern confessional style as you can get.

This doyenne of Fleet Street delivers her observations with precision, style and wit. Her writing is beautiful, funny, sensible and smart – and her show, directed by The Young Ones’ Nigel Planer, is an absolute delight.

(Rated 4/ 5 )
Reviewed by Alice Jones
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
Link to article on independent.co.uk

Age cannot wither her

According to Virginia Ironside, doyenne of Fleet Street and agony aunt extraordinaire, one of the myriad pleasures of hitting one’s sixties is the confidence that comes with old age. And one need look no further than Ironside herself for the proof.

At the distinguished age of 65, having eschewed a reading in the cosy confines of the Book Festival at Charlotte Square Gardens or a couple of dates in an “Evening with…” format, reading the odd diary note here, answering the odd question there, the writer has signed up for a full month of stand-up shows at the Gilded Balloon.

And what a delightfully refreshing addition she makes to the scene, too. With a vase of fresh-cut flowers beside her and dressed in an elegant sea-green dress, sparkly brooch and, bit of a shock this, neon-pink patent high heels (to stop her looking like a librarian on stage, apparently), she’s poised, polite, with cut-glass diction and unexpectedly spot-on comic timing.

The show, directed by Nigel Planer (there’s a Young Ones joke to be made there somewhere), is a gentle, life-affirming ramble through the joys of being a sexagenarian – the bus passes, the bird-watching, the glamorous dressing gowns and the grandchildren. That description, though, hardly does justice to the sharpness of the observation and writing here. “Don’t wear glasses on strings,” she advises us schoolmarm-like. “They make you look deaf.” Elsewhere, Miami is likened to Hove, “but with gangsters”, and the fluffy-haired vision of old age as imagined on Bupa leaflets comes in for a good kicking.

No stand-up show would be complete without a little sex, drugs and rock’n'roll and Ironside covers all of these with great gusto, from an ecstatic riff on the pleasures of pills (the drug dealing routine is the strongest in the show), to intimate encounters with old men “with chests like rolled-up Austrian blinds” and reminiscences from her time as a rock columnist on The Daily Mail in the Sixties. She doesn’t shy away from death either in a beautifully judged segment towards the end.

Though the audience is largely pensioners (who make up a vast segment of Fringe ticket buyers), this is a witty show for all ages, providing a lunchtime oasis of grown-up calm and wisdom amid the histrionics of the festival. Plus, it’s the first, and probably the last, time you’ll ever hear a colostomy-bag showstopper or a glucosamine sulphate-related heckle.