The women behind Growing Old Disgracefully and Midlife Dramas in Pyjamas are swapping social media for the stage with a new comedy show at Gateshead’s Little Theatre.
For years, Yvonne Vincent and Marie Thom have been making women laugh online about the indignities, absurdities and occasional joys of getting older. Now they are taking that humour somewhere considerably more terrifying: a live stage.
Yvonne, a bestselling author and the woman behind Growing Old Disgracefully, and Marie, creator of Midlife Dramas in Pyjamas, have a combined social media following of around 200,000. The pair met through their Facebook pages in 2023. Discovering they both lived in Gateshead, they arranged a quick coffee. Three hours later they were friends, and before long they had started the Hear Me Roar podcast, sharing stories from midlife and beyond.
“The power of saying yes to new things comes up again and again with our guests,” says Yvonne.
They were forced to test that philosophy themselves last year when they agreed to perform a 20-minute comedy set in London.
“We’d never done anything like it, so it was daunting,” says Marie. “But we were buzzing afterwards and realised that if we could write twenty minutes, we could write a whole show.” So they hired Gateshead’s Little Theatre and did exactly that.
The result is Hear Me Roar, an original live show combining comedy sketches, songs and audience games, taking a sideways swipe at everything from the menopause to the manosphere.
“It’s aimed squarely at women like us,” says Yvonne. “Women who sleep with the fan on in winter. Women who pluck. And women who couldn’t give a pluck. We want to find our tribe.”
Behind the comedy is a more serious theme. Centre for Ageing Better research has found that women over 50 are more likely than men to experience being ignored, patronised or dismissed because of their age, while people in the North East report the highest levels of age discrimination in England.
A 2026 poll also found that around two-thirds of UK adults believe 56 is the age at which people stop looking good in the latest fashions — and one in ten put the cut-off at just 40.
Yvonne and Marie have chosen a fairly direct response. “We refuse to be invisible,” they say. “Our age does not define us. We will keep coming back bolder and better.”
Hear Me Roar is at the Little Theatre, Saltwell View, Gateshead, at 7.15pm on Saturday 19 September 2026. Tickets: ticketsource.com/hear-me-roar
Further information can be found at: http://www.hearmeroarhere.com
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