Sharon Horgan’s ‘Youth’ Blends Humor with Realism to Capture the Quadrupole Phase of Life

DUBAI: The premise of Irish actor, writer and comedian Sharon Horgan’s latest show, “Youth,” now streaming on OSN in the region, is a simple one. Horgan plays Alex, a 50-something divorcee stuck firmly in the sandwich generation, struggling to balance the needs of her wayward university-age son Ruari (a convincing Aran Murphy), with those of her ageing parents — her mother has diabetes and her father has dementia, while still holding down her job as a literary agent and trying to re-enter the dating scene.
So, there’s a lot going on, and Horgan portrays it all convincingly, both in her writing and performance; Alex is a fully rounded, believable character — strong and smart, but making some terrible decisions and lacking the confidence to speak up to those who underestimate her, including her friend and boss of 10 years, Sam (Sharlene Whyte), and Ruari, whose disastrous first week at university sees him return home just as Alex has started making the most of her empty-nest freedom and immediately going full-teenager, refusing to discuss anything about his decision to drop out (or anything else, really) and spending most of his time holed-up in his bedroom.
Like Horgan’s other creations, which include “Motherland” and “Catastrophe,” “Youth” has a well-judged balance of laughter and heart, with plenty of genuinely touching moments defused with a deft joke.
And Horgan is unafraid to feature the unpleasant side of hitting your fifties (the betrayals of your body, the regrets, the wondering how to start a new chapter of your life as old ones end) — often in graphic detail — but she’s equally able to show us that that’s not the whole story. There is joy and fun here too, rather than a simple list of gripes about ageing.
Perhaps Horgan’s greatest quality as a writer, and the reason why “Youth” is so much more than a show about a perimenopausal woman, is her ability to create entirely convincing characters of all ages and genders — the men, the kids, the geriatrics… they’re all layered, relatable people. Even when her comedy goes broad or veers towards the stereotypical (as it does with some of her characters from the literary world — flamboyant agents, horribly vain authors, etc…), Horgan anchors it in emotional truth. It sounds simple. But as 90 percent of sitcoms show us, it really isn’t.

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