As far back as 400 BC, Greek physician Hippocrates associated many women’s health issues with what became known as “hysteria”, a term that remained in medical dictionaries until 1980.

That’s just one startling fact in the hilarious song A Brief History of Menopause from the upcoming musical, Middle Raged – A Musical Meltdown (8-11 July at The Playhouse).

Incidentally, so-called “hysteria” was treated by giving women horse urine and pulverised cow testicles.

“That was Hippocrates’ lasting gift to women,” said Queenie van de Zandt, the show’s co-writer. “Thank you, Hippocrates, for how much damage that’s done to us all those years. Basically, any woman that had an opinion was called hysterical.”

Middle-Raged is much more than a girls’ night out (even though it does open with a karaoke party of ‘80s feminist bangers) as it’s based on real stories from hundreds of women across Australia.

“The very first scene is at a 50th birthday party with all these women and that’s because that’s actually how we came up with the show,” said Queenie, who’s a born-and-bred Canberran and a Daramalan College alumni.

“We were all bitching about what was going on with us and I said, ‘Oh my God we’re not middle-aged, we’re middle-raged’ and everyone just went, ‘Oh that’s it.’”

It took Queenie and co-writer Tiffany Noack five years to survey women and to collect their stories.

“There’s a very funny song called The To-Do List, which is made up of all these women from our survey, who we got to write down their to-do list, which was just fascinating to read,” Queenie said.

“It’s like: get Brian’s braces taken off, fix the shoes for Max, buy the dog biscuits. We had massive amounts of everybody’s to-do lists and wrote this extraordinarily funny song. It’s wonderful.”

While writing the show – which is not quite a musical or a revue, more a revue-sical – Queenie said Middle-Raged had to contain the three Es: entertainment, education and empowerment.

“We were all lost in the woods at this period of our lives, walking around going, ‘What fresh hell is this? And why did nobody tell me this is coming?’” she said. “We really wanted to bridge the knowledge because lot of women still don’t know what’s going on with them in middle age.

“What we found in our research and in interviewing all these amazing women was that menopause is difficult but it forces us to go through a period of reflection.”

Queenie said that once women hit their 50s, we become “queen-agers”.

“We are the ones that are the rulers, the grandmothers, and in doing that, women have extraordinary third acts,” she said. “People go out and start new careers, they get PhDs, they do extraordinary things, whereas it’s not quite the same for men.

“They don’t go through a physiological change that forces them to have to reinvent themselves. That’s why often men go backwards and try and repeat their first life. They dump their first wife, get married with a younger wife, have another family, have another go.”

There’s a beautiful monologue in the show about “sandwich caring” (when a woman is caring for both elderly parents and children), which you, the audience, can be a part of.

“We write to the audience before the show and ask for photographs of their child or of their father, the last photo you have of him,” Queenie said. “Those photos come up on the screen at this moment and it’s just so beautiful.”

Heartbreaking moments yes, but the main theme throughout the show is “I know what you’re going through and I get it, I get it sister”.

Middle Raged – A Musical Meltdown is on 8-11 July at The Playhouse. For tickets, visit canberratheatrecentre.com.au/show/middle-raged-2026