Why I wrote a Play about Ageism

Aw Bless! What is Old Age For?

When a friend of mine turned seventy, I gave her a book on the history of old age; she was horrified and gave it back. I was surprised that she reacted in that way but it was probably me being tactless and unaware. The gift wasn’t intended as a rather off joke on my part, rather a real interest in the exploration of ageing and the facts about our treatment through the centuries.

Because of course, ageing affects all of us and at the tender age of twenty five (the age when we reach maturity, allegedly) and thereafter, the dreaded noughts birthdays seem to weigh heavily on us. Personally, in the 1960s I was rather looking forward to being thirty – I imagined myself as the French film actress Jeanne Moreau, famous at the time for her sultry sexiness and compelling on-screen talent in her thirties and well beyond. I have long had a fascination with the ageing process, helped I’m sure by playing many different characters of all ages, over many years in the theatre.

At nineteen. I joined a theatre repertory company in Derby which produced a different play every fortnight. Since I was the youngest member of the company, I got the small parts left over when the main ones had been cast. The upshot was that I played a lot of old ladies. I made the most of these opportunities by heavily making up my teenage face with wrinkles, created varicose veins with rolled up pieces of paper stuffed down thick stockings and dusted my brown hair with copious amounts of talc. So as I moved, a small cloud of white dust would follow me around. In a play called Rookery Nook I was the char lady (don’t write in please that’s what they were called in the early 1960s) and pronounced the immortal exit line “...and what’s more there’s an ‘orse in my kitchen…” followed by the edifying round of applause as I exited.

There’s nothing quite like literally standing in another’s shoes to know how it feels. Playing a part gives you objectivity and if you try hard enough, you can inhabit the role. I am grateful to those early years in rep learning, as they say, on the job. But I was glad to eventually play women of my own age.

Arriving in London in the mid 1960s, I was enthralled and swept up in the big city energy after the dark, smoky, behind-the-times midlands. I found an agent and began playing small parts on television, mostly in sit-coms. I wore lovely clothes and enjoyed being pampered in the TV hair and make-up department. All except one part in a Wednesday Play where I played a shaven headed woman dressed in sackcloth in an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Ape and Essence. This post-apocalyptic play involved a yearly orgy which resulted in much grunting and fumbling among the actors in the sack cloth garments and became unintentionally hilarious, more like a Carry On film than this serious dystopian play. It was of course in the time before intimacy coaches.

Yet something else was tugging at my sleeve and after visiting the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, run by the irrepressible Jim Haynes, who went on to co-found the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and whose life maxim was never to say no; I wanted to be in the thick of developing new ideas for making theatre that wasn’t always about the well-made play. This new theatre didn’t have to take place on a conventional proscenium stage but could happen anywhere, in the street, in disused buildings, barns as well as in private homes.

Bite Out

I became involved in workshops which offered exciting new theatre techniques and dealt with contemporary, often political, themes. I joined a company called The Wherehouse La Mama which was an off-shoot of the famous New York La Mama Theatre. We were a very physical theatre company and I became fitter and stronger than I have ever been before or since. Our first piece was called Group Juice - a very sweaty piece in tights and tee shirts with no set or props. It followed the individual’s journey from the cradle, through society’s manipulation, to death. When we presented the show at Queen’s University Belfast in 1969, the students went wild and threw their seat cushions in the air. The wonderful celebrations that followed was partly because of the theme of the piece and partly because we were one of the few theatre companies to travel to Northern Ireland at the time. When we left, our new fans gave each of us a bottle of whiskey and stood on the quayside waving their handkerchiefs, a touching and strangely old-fashioned gesture that has remained with me ever since.

We toured European cities in the summer of 1970 and the group finally split up acrimoniously in Amsterdam, at the end of the tour. We had behaved very much like a rock band; feted, slated, creative and hugely energetic but differences of opinion did for the company in the end.

I stayed on in that beautiful city for a year, running theatre workshops and studying singing at the Conservatoire in the Hague. Then homesickness urged my return to England where many new experimental companies were forming and I relished working with groups like The Phantom Captain, Lumiere and Son, Rational Theatre and The People Show. Finally forming my own company called Salt Theatre with another actor, Sandy Maberley

I had now reached my thirties, I hadn’t become a Jeanne Moreau lookalike but had discovered feminism. My consciousness was becoming painfully raised through books like Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and, Women’s Estate by Juliet Mitchell. Feminist theatre companies were being formed : Monstrous Regiment, Beryl and the Perils, Scarlet Harlets, Cunning Stunts, the Women’s Theatre Group and many more.

Cell

Our company Salt also worked with a feminist perspective in productions with women and men. We were a group of like-minded young performers devising our own shows. Headlock about a family of wrestlers, toured with our very own wrestling ring and we wrestled both physically and psychologically with the family dynamic and played inside and outside venues to crowds of enthusiastic young people.

When I was thirty six, I began to co-write a script for a feature film with an American film director. The idea was that I would play the lead in this dark comedy. The script did the rounds of production companies in the UK and began to garner interest. As I was an unknown actor, a ‘name’ was sought for the male lead. It was then that I became intensely scrutinised and my weight, eyes and teeth were deemed not good enough for film, but most of all, my age, at thirty six, was a complete no no. The film was eventually made in the US with an all-American cast and I had to fight for a writing credit.

In my early forties, I worked with Scarlet theatre (formerly Scarlet Harlets) which included working on a show called (R) Age which I directed, about the eternal triptych of the maiden, the mother and the old woman. It was the first time I had worked with an older actor and it was fascinating to draw on Una Brandon Jone’s experiences of growing old and her determination to keep acting into her seventies.

Cell

After a long career in the theatre, performing in many shows with different companies and writing for theatre and opera, I was commissioned in 2023 by Oxford University to write a solo show about Julian of Norwich. Living in the 14^th century. she is our most famous mystic and the first woman to write in English. Her beautiful book Revelations of Divine Love was written in secret while she was permanently secluded in a tiny cell attached to a church in Norwich. Julian lived for over thirty years, well into her seventies, in this cell that she could never leave. My show Cell based on her life and work was part of the Medieval Women Exhibition at the British Library.

So here I am at 82 and still working. My new solo show is called ‘Aw Bless! What is old age for?’

It is about ageing and ageism because it feels necessary to write this piece now, given the overwhelming feeling that me and my contemporaries are “othered” by a society that values youth much more highly than age.

There are more people alive in the world aged over sixty today than there have ever been before in history. This is often seen as a problem especially because the falling birth rate gives rise to the idea that there won’t be enough people to pay for our longevity, or our care when it becomes necessary. The pension triple lock is a source of resentment, wrongly assuming that all old people have money, but when there is still a great deal of pensioner poverty in this country. The inadequacy of highly expensive care homes, the loneliness among old people, the patronising behaviour and often downright rudeness towards us, all contributes to ageism on the part of those who are not yet old themselves.

Ageism happens between the ears and is engendered by fear. Everyone wants to live a long time and many want to remain eternally youthful, so are spending a great deal of time and money to capture and hold on to it. All this belief that youth has the only value, adds to the hostility towards old age. So it is important for us to push back against an ageist society that ignores our experience, our contributions and belittles ageing as some sort of failure and death even more so. A great many people over sixty are still working or would like to be if they were allowed and there are uncounted numbers of old people volunteering in the charity sector and many others giving unpaid caring for their loved ones.

The title ‘Aw Bless! is taken from the patronising comment made so often about an old person. The show draws on my life experiences of ageing and those of friends and neighbours, as well as current research plus some history of old age. It both funny and dark and performed with much goodwill for an audience of all ages. An important part of the show is devoted to the audience, where they are invited to share their experiences and opinions about ageing at whatever stage of life they might be – ageism also affects the young.

By the way, the friend I mentioned at the top of this piece is very supportive of my project and has now bought her own copy of the book on ageing!

Ah Bless! What is old age for? is now available for bookings. If you would be interested in having the show, please contact me on my website cindyoswin.com for more details.