In Riot Women, five ‘unlikely’ women, Beth (Joanna Scanlan), Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), Kitty (Rosalie Craig), Holly (Tamsin Greig), and Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore)- fed up, backed against the wall, and… menopausal- decide to start a band for a school fundraiser. What starts out as something to do to kill time with turns into a space for expression, and a chance for their hurt to be heard. In the group, and in each other, the women find refuge, friendship, and connections that run deeper than music.
Created and written by Sally Wainwright, Riot Women explores the multiple ways that women experience hardship in misogynistic societies, and pushes the envelope by centring older women, empowering them to the audience by placing them in a space they are not usually seen. How many rock bands are made up of five middle-aged women? They may be different- Beth the caretaker, Jess the matriarch, rough-around-the-edges Kitty, Yvonne the police officer, and type A Holly- but each of them experiences a struggle that is unique to them, exacerbated by the fact that they are a woman. (I’ve set my writing this article to ‘Ice Cream Man’ by Raye because this story reminds me of its chorus).
I see a lot of discourse online about what women need to do to get married, stay married, to avoid assault, to make sure their kids aren’t terrible people, and generally make people around them feel comfortable, and I imagine that if I heard this rhetoric for some five decades, maybe even obeyed its principles and still did not find the fulfilment it promised, I’d need some kind of support group. Riot Women corrects some of the fallacies that line of thinking comes with, so that, hopefully, more women get to their own autonomy quicker.
I always talk about music being healing, because it is. Finally finding words for buried experiences, or melodies that somehow reach your soul even when no words are attached to them, or beats that move you to channel whatever energy is in you to motion, is a pretty magical experience. It’s even better when it brings you people to hold your hand through life and find healing with.
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Outside of the music, some dramatic events are unfolding in the women’s lives that sets the show up nicely for season 2. I, personally, like an ‘aftermath of a woman scorned’ story, so I’m intrigued to see how that plays out.
Riot Women began with its two episode premiere on January 14th on Britbox, with new episodes airing weekly afterwards
