Acting your age and being as old as you feel: mind, body and ageing in drama, theatre and performance

‘What do you read, my lord?’ asks the wise old counsellor. ‘Slanders, sir’ replies the rude young prince; ‘for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams; all of which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down.’ And thus Prince Hamlet flashes in front of Polonius’s eyes a mirror up to nature, one in which Polonius may or may not see himself reflected.

Culture teaches us at an early age to recognize such bodily identifiers of biological ageing; and even if, like Hamlet ,we hold it not honesty, or at least courtesy, to have them thus set down, we sense in them a reassuringly – or a disquietingly - objective, empirical feel. In fact, however, as recent research suggests, signs such as grey hair and wrinkles do not translate with any degree of accuracy into objective standards of chronological age. Ten years and $20million of research funded by the American National Institute on Ageing, has not delivered the hoped-for result of determining the biomarkers of age, those objective biological features by which we might classify people into age groups and categorically define the ‘old’ and the ‘young’.

In any case, that ‘satirical rogue’ whose words, words, words Hamlet is reading, is telling only a part of the story. Biological ageing is one thing; social ageing is another – whether we understand this as patterns of intergenerational relationships, as a sequence of ages and age statuses, or as age-based normative expectations. In recent years, social gerontologists have been quick to insist that age cannot be taken for granted as a biologically-grounded given, but is to be seen as one of the key bases for the production of social identity.

Theatrical performance concerns itself with both body and mind, with the signifier and signified, with the physical/biological organism that is the performer and with the questions of self and identity which the performance generates. Age, like gender, brings a particular sharpness to some of these questions. Unlike gender, however, ageing draws attention to the gaps that can exist between esse and percipi: between how one feels oneself to be, and how one may be perceived. Researchers into ageing have frequently found that when interviewees in their sixties, seventies and eighties were asked directly about how they saw themselves in terms of age, ‘scarcely any of them thought of themselves as old. There was an apparent contradiction – a kind of disconnection, therefore, between how they looked, how they were, how they felt, and what they thought’ (Thompson, Itzin and Abendstern 1990: 113).

This paper will explore various aspects of these signs, contradictions and disconnections as they emerge in a variety of dramatic, theatrical and performative contexts. Looking at a range of texts and performances, from Shakespeare to senior performance groups, from regression therapies to contemporary playwriting, and from television sitcom to reminiscence theatre, it will consider what light the methodologies of drama, theatre and performance studies in conjunction with the concerns of consciousness studies can throw upon our understanding of the social aspects of ageing.