Linda Nolan tells MARION SAUVEBOIS of her journey through depression and back on to the stage in her new show

A few years ago the prospect of belting out light-hearted ditties about the blight of hot flushes and mood swings would have been unthinkable for Linda Nolan.

Holed up at home, rudderless and crippled by grief following the death of her husband she had near on given up on life let alone her career.

“At the depths of my depression I was suicidal, I had lost hope that there would be light at the end of the tunnel,” says the 57-year-old performer with surprising candour. “I just couldn't work. It was too much.”

The last decade brought a relentless succession of setbacks and family tragedy starting in 2005 with her diagnosis with breast cancer. She beat the illness but in 2007 her husband of 26 years Brian succumbed to skin cancer. Three months later, her mother Maureen passed away. Linda plunged into severe depression. Her troubles only worsened as the months went by. Unable to support herself, she began claiming benefits. She was subjected to a very public 18-month benefit fraud investigation which, to her deep relief, was dropped last year.

With the support of her family she gradually picked herself back up and joined her siblings for a Nolan Sisters reunion tour in 2009 but, shortly afterwards, her sister Bernie was diagnosed with breast cancer. She did not survive. This loss hurled her to the brink once again.

Still reeling from Bernie’s death, she was approached to play a feisty soap opera star in fierce denial of her tell-tale symptoms in Menopause The Musical. But she wavered.

“I got into a downward spiral of depression,” says Linda, who rose to fame in the 1970s in an all-singing, all-dancing family troupe with her sisters before forging a successful solo career. “And this show came along in Ireland. I was terrified. This was my first solo role since the reunion tour. My sisters said, 'We have cousins there you can stay with them, you won't be alone, they'll look after you. If you're going to go back to work, it's the easiest way to start again.' After the first couple of rehearsals I said, 'I think I can do this'. I loved it.

“But I couldn't have done it without my family. My husband used to say 'The Nolans are the cavalry. They come in from all corners to help you and love you.'”

Determined to explode taboos, Linda has been very vocal about her struggles with depression and grappling with suicide. While all fun and laughter on the surface she found Menopause The Musical, which follows the tribulations of a group of women wrangling with the 'change' in all its clammy and unglamorous glory to reworkings of popular hits, a great platform to dispel the stigma shrouding the inevitable right of passage.

“It's still something a lot of women don't talk about,” says Linda, “I don't ever remember my mum or auntie talk about the menopause. And this show says it's ok to talk about it. The menopause can be hard at times, you go out and your make-up is melting, you get hot flushes, but in a way it's actually quite funny. The audience go home quite liberated.”

Having gone into early menopause at 47 as a result of cancer treatment, she came to the role armed with years of personal insights, war stories and genuinely overworked sweat glands. Her bouts of hyperventilation on stage, she quips, are 100 per cent real.

“It's the first time in my life I've been a method actress,” she laughs warmly. “I come to the stage with my hot flushes.”

Joking and doggedly searching for silver linings, she is miles from the unravelling woman of just three years ago. She confesses she never expected to reach a point beyond grief but “the cavalry's” unflagging support, her devotion to her great nieces and nephews and decision to foster care slowly eventually pulled her out despondency.

“I will never get over losing my husband, my parents or Bernie,” sighs Linda. “But when Brian died people said to me, 'Time is a great healer'. I looked at them as if to say, 'What are you talking about?' But it is. Now I can breathe more easily in the morning. There was a point when I thought life wasn't worth living but now I know there is so much to live for.”

Menopause The Musical appears at the Wyvern on Sunday, May 8. To book call 01793 524481 or go to swindontheatres.co.uk.