Sally Wainwright’s return to terrestrial TV after the shattering end to Happy Valley in 2023 was always going to have to meet a high bar. With Riot Women, the tale of a west Yorkshire punk band made up entirely of angry women, it’s fair to say she’s left that bar several miles below her.
We meet her all-female protagonists jammed firmly into midlife’s suffocating sandwich: adult children on one side and ageing parents on the other, all covered in a constant drizzle of perimenopause symptoms. Wainwright has harnessed the enervated choler of Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood and turned it all the way up to 11, but the instigators in Riot Women aren’t just rolling their eyes about hot flushes – they’re on the very edge and ready to burn it all down.
Beth (Joanna Scanlan) places her slippers neatly together on the carpet and climbs onto a stool, ready to end her life, when the phone rings. It’s her friend Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), asking her “Do you wanna be in a rock band?”
Scanlan’s eyes burn with midlife lassitude, her performance always hugging hard onto the feelings without releasing them. “And you thought The Clash were angry,” Beth says later as she tells the guy selling her a keyboard what kind of music the band is going to play. Her troubles are far from over, but the band sparks something in her, a long-forgotten desire to express herself through music.
Ashbourne is also superb as a pub landlady and frustrated drummer who assembles the band to play the local school talent contest. She has all the restraint you’d expect of a wearied Wainwright woman, but the sedition bubbles underneath.
Meanwhile, the rest of our musical avengers assemble. Holly (Tamsin Greig) is on her final shift as a police officer and wondering what post-work life will look like when she’s called to a shop to becalm a woman on a supermarket sweep in the paracetamol and vodka aisle.
Jeopardy comes in the shape of Kitty (Rosalie Craig), an engine of chaos in knee-high dockers and a Joker smile, thanks to a mishap while carrying a knife in her teeth. Her married lover has dumped her, leaving her with nowhere to go. Anyone used to seeing Craig crooning Sondheim in the West End will marvel at her portrayal of the spitting, snarling Kitty. She’s astonishing.
In the first episode’s stirring climax, Beth is about to throw in the towel again when she hears a voice singing drunk karaoke in a nearby pub. This is the most spiritual of calls to action. Kitty growls spleen into the microphone and Beth knows she needs her in the band.
The performance will live or die on Kitty’s brittle, brilliant pipes but can she hold it together long enough to make it to their first gig? She could raise them up to the stars or destroy them, depending on which way the wind is blowing.
Every member of the cast works in perfect unison, rounded out by the impressive talents of Sue Johnston and Anne Reid as Aunt Mary and Nancy, women in the next stage of life, one with probable dementia.
Wainwright has said in interviews that her own experiences with an ill parent while having her two boys still at home inspired her to write Riot Women. So many women will find power in being so seen.
Wainwright isn’t the first to tackle the menopause years, but she’s one of the very best to do so. We ask so much of middle-aged women, but we don’t notice they’re holding up the sky at a time when everything physical and emotional is crumbling. Riot Women plugs into that accepted overload so many of us contain and asks: what would happen if we tapped that vein and let it rip?
Back in Calderdale, the band can’t decide what song to do first so Beth decides for them. A Rolling Stones cover – “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. That’s sure to strike a chord with women everywhere.
