Youth review – Sharon Horgan is back … and she’s better than ever

This brutal, hilarious new show about life as a fiftysomething is full of all the heart and humour of human life. At points it’s mesmerisingly perfect There’s a moment in Sharon Horgan’s new show, Youth, when – as protagonist Alex (Horgan) is seeing her son off to university – she inadvertently begins to run after the car that’s taking him away. And then she catches herself, and slows. And then she starts up again.

It was such a tender, vicious glimpse into the future that I found myself sobbing into the sofa and cursing her name. All of which is to say: Sharon Horgan is back and she’s better than ever. Youth is the representation every woman who has ever slapped on an oestrogen patch after a divorce, looked around and thought “What the hell now? ” has been waiting for. Horgan herself has described it in interviews as forming the third part of a loose trilogy that began with Pulling. Co-written with Dennis Kelly, Pulling was about…