Bridget Christie's Jacket Potato Pizza: A Menopause-Fuelled Standup Show
Comedian Bridget Christie brings her latest show Jacket Potato Pizza to the stage at Bristol Beacon, delivering a performance that explores life after menopause with her signature flair and biting sarcasm. While the show offers plenty of entertainment over its 90-minute runtime, it may lack the political fervour that has characterised some of her previous work.
Finding Freedom in Menopause
The show opens with Christie reflecting on her current state of contentment - serenely single, professionally successful with television appearances including Channel 4's The Change, and liberated by menopause from caring about societal expectations. This newfound freedom becomes the central theme, with Christie mining comedy from what life looks like for women when oestrogen recedes and priorities shift dramatically.
Christie's performance style remains as engaging as ever, with her characteristic pop-eyed dismay bringing to life anecdotes about menopausal experiences. Early routines contrast her younger, eager-to-please self with her current incarnation who cares little about social conventions, whether indulging improbable sexual fetishes or being caught eating cake directly from the bin by her gardener.
Sketch-Based Comedy and Everyday Absurdities
The show's structure leans more toward sketch comedy than traditional standup, particularly in the first half where Christie re-enacts a friend's banal night out story that transforms into a symphony of digressions and malapropisms. One memorable moment involves confusing Benjamin Zephaniah with Benjamin Netanyahu, showcasing Christie's talent for finding humour in linguistic confusion and memory lapses.
Throughout the performance, Christie constructs what she describes as mini-carnivals of her own ridiculousness, with routines covering everything from recording bodily functions for WhatsApp friends to reporting increasingly exotic medical symptoms to doctors. The material celebrates social invisibility as a fiftysomething woman and finds liberation in reproductive life coming to an end.
Political Elements and Performance Highlights
While the show begins with contrasting quotations from Presidents Obama and Trump, this proves somewhat misleading as political commentary takes a backseat to personal observation for much of the performance. However, when politics do emerge, they provide some of the show's most compelling moments.
A later section taking issue with the TV drama Adolescence demonstrates Christie at her best - passionate, provocative, and delivering opinions with her trademark 10-ton sarcasm. Another standout routine explores the thermonuclear obnoxiousness of 15-year-old girls, which Christie insists isn't drawn from personal family experience.
Comfort Zone and Missed Opportunities
Some routines feel less successful than others, with a segment about Alan Carr and The Traitors seeming too throwaway to justify its clunky segue from a discussion about ICE killings in Minnesota. Similarly, a joke about Jimmy Savile and adding clauses to her will feels somewhat arbitrary and disconnected from the show's broader themes.
The conclusion features sobering words about the state of the world, but these political observations aren't fully integrated into the comedy that precedes them. While Christie's demob-happiness proves infectious and her comic timing remains impeccable, there's a sense that she's operating within her comfort zone with this material.
Final Verdict on Jacket Potato Pizza
Jacket Potato Pizza delivers another effervescent show from one of Britain's most distinctive comedic voices, packed with sharp observations about menopause, ageing, and personal liberation. While it may not reach the essential status of some of Christie's previous work, it offers ninety minutes of solid entertainment from a comedian who has clearly found creative freedom in her post-menopausal phase.
The show continues touring across the UK until 22nd May, bringing Christie's unique perspective on female experience to audiences nationwide. For fans of her work and those interested in comedy that tackles women's issues with intelligence and humour, Jacket Potato Pizza provides plenty to enjoy, even if the political edge that once defined her performances has been somewhat dialled down in favour of personal revelation and everyday absurdity.
