Staging Ageing

Theatre, Performance and the Narrative of Decline

Michael Mangan

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781783200139
• eBook ISBN: 9781783201389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

How can plays and performances, past and present, inform our understanding of ageing? Drawing primarily on the Western dramatic canon, on contemporary British theatre, on popular culture and on paratheatrical practices, Staging Ageing investigates theatrical engagement with ageing from the Greek chorus to Reminiscence Theatre. It also explores the relationship of the plays, performances, and practices to the material, social and ideological conditions that produced them. A seminal work on the cultural past and present of ageing, the book will find grateful audiences not only among scholars but also among theatre and health care professionals.

PART I

Frames and Contexts

Chapter 1

On Gerontology

The first gerontologist?

As yet, social gerontology as a distinct academic field is itself hardly of pensionable age. Nonetheless, the social aspects of ageing have been the subject of inquiry for thousands of years. One of the founding texts of western philosophy, Plato’s Republic, opens its inquiry into politics, metaphysics, philosophy and truth with a consideration of old age. It begins with Socrates and his friends visiting the house of Polemarchus in the Piraeus. There they meet with Polemarchus’ aged father, Cephalus, a man who seems very much at peace with himself in his old age. He is an affectionately drawn caricature, whose initial greeting is immediately followed by an old man’s stereotypical complaint that Socrates does not come to see him as often as he should. Socrates is eager to avoid any imputation of ageism. He says:

There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the ‘threshold of old age’ – Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?

(Plato [c. 380 BCE] 1970: 85)

Socrates is, of course, an inveterate questioner – his whole dialogic technique is based on asking clever questions which lead his interlocutors into more and more untenable logical positions, eventually demonstrating triumphantly that he – Socrates/Plato is right. His question to Cephalus, though, is not one of his rhetorical tricks: Socrates is asking a genuine question. He himself has not reached Cephalus’ time of life, and he does not know what it feels like to be old. The supreme philosopher recognizes that the experience of old age is only available to the old themselves. So he asks Cephalus. And to that extent he is in a position not unlike most gerontologists today. Some of us are, it is true, no longer spring chickens, and many of us are pushing retirement age – or have already passed it. But most of us are studying something that is not quite ourselves. The subject of our study is not, for the most part, reflected in ourselves as we are now, so much as in ourselves as we imagine ourselves to be at some point in the future.

And in this respect, work on the cultural aspects of ageing is very different from work on gender and culture. Gender work – whether done by literary critics, sociologists, historians, geographers – nearly always has an element of autobiography about it. When I wrote a book a few years ago about staging masculinities (Mangan 2002) I felt the need to start it by placing myself in terms of the gender issues that it raised about my own negotiations between the stage and masculinity, and the writing of it continually returned me to my own sense of a gendered self – both in its similarities to the issues that the texts raised for me and in its differences. I had imagined that writing a book on theatre and ageing would be very similar to writing one about theatre and gender, since both raise such pressing questions about identity construction. It took me a little while to see just how great a gulf lies between them, and how most gerontologists of whatever hue are basically in the same position as Socrates – knowing that there is much that they do not know about what it is actually like to be old, and contemplating those ‘travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult’.

But if Socrates’ question offers something pertinent to contemporary gerontologists, then so does Cephalus’ reply:

I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is – I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles – are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

(Plato [c. 380 BCE] 1970: 85)

He goes on a bit, it is true, but he is worth hearing out because he makes a crucial point. His reply has been interpreted in various ways by various critics. Stephen Marx sees Cephalus as a positive exemplar of ‘the pastoral of old age’ (Marx 1985: 39). Helen Small, on the other hand, in The Long Life, finds the old man interesting only insofar as he anticipates something of Cicero’s later argument in De Senectute about old age bringing with it a respite from the mad and furious mastery of passions such as love and sexual desire; beyond that she is rather dismissive of him, concluding that he ‘is not presented as a philosopher of any great merit’ (Small 2007: 28).

But, whether he is a philosopher of any merit or not, Cephalus is raising an important point for researchers into ageing: it is not just that the experience of ageing is diverse. More than this, he suggests to Socrates that he might be asking the wrong question. Old age simply is not the point: he tells Socrates that ‘these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known.’ Again, it is a very salutary point for gerontologists! It is all too tempting to generalize about old age and ageing: but Cephalus does not want simply to be pigeonholed as a data source in Socrates’ gerontological research project. It is not because I am old that I feel this way, he says. It is because I am me.

In the same way, when we ask questions fuelled by our own current research obsession, it is important to be aware that the answers we receive might not, after all, be entirely determined by the terms of our own investigation. ‘The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers.’ One of the themes of this book will be the extent to which old age needs to be understood, not as a phenomenon in itself, but as part of a network of social realities and constructions.

Socrates, as we might expect, gets the last word. He, too, seems to think that questions about old age may not really be the point – and indeed this is not, after all what The Republic is really about; in the rest of the volume Socrates turns to exploring a series of questions about truth, justice and metaphysics on their own terms. But before doing so he also scores a point off the venerable old man – and he does so in a way that once more reverberates through gerontological research. He accepts the point that the experience of old age may not be universal, but he adds that the philosophical tenets that Cephalus bases upon his own particular experience may not be entirely generalizable either. He replies:

Yes, Cephalus, but I rather suspect that people in general are not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old age sits lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

(Plato [c. 380 BCE] 1970: 86)

Socrates here suddenly becomes the cultural materialist. If the experience of old age is indeed culturally diverse, he suggests, one of the most important factors in that diversity – in Cephalus’ case, the factor that has enabled him to live comfortably and contentedly in his old age – may simply be money. When we talk about old age – historically or in the present, fictionally or factually – there are some things from which we cannot divorce it: things such as gender, class and the material conditions of life.

From Plato’s short dramatic scene, then, five points arise – all of which indicate some of the problems of research into ageing.

• Researching into old age usually involves, to some extent, investigation at second-hand.

• It is hard to generalize about ageing.

• Not everybody experiences ageing in the same way, and the disposition of the individual plays an enormous part.

• Social and material factors are also crucial. Socrates talks about Cephalus’ wealth – we might also consider aspects such as his race and gender.

• Ageing is not the cause of all age-related phenomena, and as researchers we would do well to be aware of the extent to which our own interest in the issue of ageing might distort our perspective.

Being old, then, is not just about being old; it is about being old and rich, or old and poor, or old and a citizen, or old and a slave, or old and a woman, or… . It is about values and politics, and it is – above all – about meaning. That, in essence, is also the standpoint of ‘modern age studies’, or ‘gerontology’ (the two are sometimes defined separately but I am considering them here as a single entity and will use the terms more or less interchangeably). Contemporary gerontologists tend not to be satisfied, of course, with Cephalus’ somewhat essentialist attribution of everything to ‘men’s characters and tempers’. Nonetheless, the general point that comes out of the dialogue between Cephalus and Socrates, about the interconnectedness of things, is one of the tenets of contemporary age studies. On a theoretical level, the interdisciplinary nature of much of age studies reinforces this. In practice, so do the methods and procedures of much age-related work with individuals – so that life-course perspectives, for example, stress the ways in which a person’s present experience of ageing is linked to his or her own earlier life, to the lives of other individuals, and to their historical contexts. And the big questions to which contemporary gerontology continually returns are the questions of meaning: what does it mean to be old? To the old person? To others?

I shall be using theatre and performance to investigate these questions in various contexts, and theatre and performance are also continually concerned with making and exploring meanings. In Shakespeare’s plays, for example, old age may at times be equated with hatred and destruction (Romeo and Juliet) or foolishness (Polonius in Hamlet); at other times it may seem to embody a kind of transcendent wisdom (The Tempest). The theatrical meanings of old age are sometimes social and shared, sometimes metaphorical, and sometimes painfully subjective.

Reading age studies against performance studies: Orientations

The broad tendency of this book will be to read age studies against performance studies – and vice versa. By this I mean that I will be investigating a series of selected plays and performances which deal significantly with old age and ageing, and analysing them (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) in relation to ideas, terms and theories drawn both from contemporary gerontology and from performance and literary studies. So, for example, in the course of examining both historical and contemporary plays and performances, we will also be looking at gerontological theories of life review, reminiscence and self-narrativization, biological theories of ageing, the recent social history of the care home, questions of gender, liminality, generational conflict and so on. In juxtaposing the procedures of performance analysis with the concerns and insights of age studies, the intention has been to discover what light each might throw on the other. In the process, I have tried to avoid being programmatic, and to resist the temptation to privilege one paradigm over the other. My proposition is a simple one: that there might be mutual benefit in this dual perspective.

In order to work in this way, however, it is necessary to provide a broad-brush picture of some of the concerns of contemporary age studies. As I suggest previously, Plato begins to map out some of the research questions and methodologies, and many of the points which arise from the beginning of The Republic continue to speak to us today. But modern gerontology has developed a further agenda and an intellectual framework of its own. At this point, then, I want to sketch out some of the aspects of this agenda and framework, and to locate some of the broad agreements that exist and within which this book operates. To do so is inevitably to oversimplify, and I offer my apologies to those many scholars and researchers whose nuanced work shows up these oversimplifications for what they are. Even so, this book is aimed at readers whose background lies in theatre and performance studies as well as those with an in-depth understanding of gerontology, and the former, I hope, may find such an introductory sketch helpful. In what follows, then, I shall offer a brief review of some of the key tenets and positions that are characteristic of contemporary age studies – with an occasional brief sideways glance at their theatrical implications.

a) Crisis?

The first point on which most gerontologists would agree is that there is currently a ‘crisis’ of ageing, both on global and local levels. A number of major national and international studies have established empirically what many people suspect instinctively – that what is going on now in terms of global population ageing is unprecedented, pervasive, profound and enduring. One of the most influential of these, the United Nations’ report on World Population Ageing, first published in 2002 and updated in 2009, describes the current situation as

a process without parallel in the history of humanity … At the world level, the number of older persons is expected to exceed the number of children for the first time in 2045 … [I]t is affecting nearly all the countries of the world … [and it] has a direct bearing on both the intergenerational and intragenerational equity and solidarity that are the foundations of society … In the economic area, population ageing will have an impact on economic growth, savings, investment, consumption, labour markets, pensions, taxation and intergenerational transfers. In the social sphere, population ageing influences family composition and living arrangements, housing demand, migration trends, epidemiology and the need for healthcare services … As long as old-age mortality continues to decline and fertility remains low, the proportion of older persons will continue to increase.

(United Nations 2009: viii)

What is happening today, then, is unique and talk of a crisis in population ageing is by no means an exaggeration. But ‘crisis’ is a loaded word, with connotations of disaster and catastrophe; in a study such as this it is well to remember that crises are as frequently caused by people’s attitudes as they are by natural forces. While the demographic statistics of global ageing are hardly subject to dispute, the different interpretations which can be put on those statistics are constantly debated. In 2002, the Executive Summary of the UN report on population ageing ended with the upbeat reminder that ‘[t]he profound, pervasive and enduring consequences of population ageing present enormous opportunities as well as enormous challenges for all societies’ (Population Division 2002: xxxi). In the 2009 update, however, that cheerfulness is notably absent.

b) Cultural ageing

The second commonplace is that ageing is socially constructed as well as biologically or chronologically determined.

Although knowledge of old age can come to us from our infirmities (our own bodies can speak to us of old age) I want to insist again that old age is in great part constructed by any given society as a social category, as is, for example, adolescence.

(Woodward 1991: 66)

There are various ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of this social constructionist position: Margaret Morganroth Gullette, for example, emphasizes the social over the biological. ‘The next provocative proposition of age studies’, she suggests, ‘might be that we are aged more by culture than by chromosomes’ (2004: 101; my emphasis). This is not a simple territorial battle between the ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1959) of the arts and the sciences: the social and cultural factors involved in the process of growing old have long been recognized by researchers in the humanities and the sciences alike. They have also, more importantly, long been recognized by the elderly themselves.

Cultural factors, after all, influence our experiences of ageing in very material ways: our economic and social situation, and the access that this affords us to benefits such as a good diet, a healthy lifestyle, effective medicines and work that is not physically debilitating – all these are cultural factors which determine the ways in which we experience the ageing process. At the level of ideology, however, our experience of ageing is also determined by the ways in which our culture constructs the very concept of old age: by the kinds of spoken and unspoken assumptions and messages that circulate about what old age ‘is’, and, most importantly, by the ways in which we internalize such messages. There are crucial links between the social construction of age, ageing, the life-course in general and the subject’s sense of the self, and our culture contains a ‘master narrative of decline’ (Gullette 2004: 129ff.) which makes ‘positive ageing’ incre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mind, Body and Ageing in Drama, Theatre and Performance
• Part I: Frames and Contexts
• Chapter 1: On Gerontology
• Chapter 2: On Age, Stage and Consciousness
• Part II: Tragedy and Comedy
• Chapter 3: On Liminality and Late Style: Oedipus at Colonus
• Chapter 4: On Negative Stereotypes in Classical and Medieval Drama
• Chapter 5: On Sex and the Senex: English Restoration Comedy
• Chapter 6: On Dirty Old Men and Trickster Figures
• Part III: Memories
• Chapter 7: On Memory and Its Modes
• Chapter 8: On Reminiscence, Interaction and Intervention
• Part IV: The Value(s) of Old Age
• Chapter 9: On Longevity
• Chapter 10: On Institutions
• Chapter 11: On Song and Dance
• Epilogue: The Amazing One-Hundred-and-Sixty-One-Year-Old Woman
• References
• Index
• Back Page