Staging Ageing

Michael Mangan

Description

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.

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

Sujets

• Social Science
• Performing Arts
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Theatre
• Sociology
• Gerontology
• Performance art
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783201389
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Theatre & Consciousness
Series editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Series ISSN: 1753-3058
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover image: Taken from Michael Mangan’s play The Inner Child’s
Compendium of Magic (Exeter, Varadi Foundation, 2006).
Copyright: Sarah Goldingay.
Production manager: Jessica Mitchell
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-013-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-137-2
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-138-9
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
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
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the very many people who helped me in the writing of this book. A large number of friends and colleagues in the fields both of theatre and of gerontology who have offered me advice, helped me find time to write, lent me books, gave me opportunities to share my work in its early stages, responded when I did so, asked good questions, shared their wisdom, chatted over a drink, collaborated with me on practical workshops and seminars, pointed me in new directions and, in short, gave me all kinds of invaluable help. The list is too long to mention everybody, but I am particularly grateful to Roland Clare, Christopher McCullough, Fiona Macbeth, Graham Ley, Nick Kaye, Anne Beynon, Sarah Goldingay, John Somers, David Melzer and the Peninsular Ageing Research Centre, David Roesner, Nela Kapelan, Andrew Thorpe, Peter Thomson, David Ian Rabey, Bonnie L. Vorenberg and the ATHE Theatre and Ageing Working Group, Valerie Barnes Lipscomb, Steven Pennell, Rob Alexander and Pier Productions, Cassie Phoenix, Rob Hallett, Tim Malone, David Amigoni, Lyn Greenwood, the staff and residents at The Lodge care home in Exeter, and Janice Hayward and staff at the Kathleen Rutland Home in Leicester. I hope that any of the friends and colleagues whose names I have omitted will have the generosity to attribute this to the failing memory of an academic who is investigating ageing experientially as well as theoretically.
My thanks are due, too, to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded the Staging Ageing project of which this is the primary output; to Departmental and School Research Committees at the University of Exeter, who gave me additional time to work on this book; to administrative and technical colleagues at both Exeter and Loughborough Universities; and to the staff and curators at the University Libraries of Exeter, Loughborough, De Montfort and Leicester. The editorial team and peer-reviewers at Intellect have been both encouraging and scrupulous in their reading, advice and feedback, and I owe special thanks to Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, who commissioned the book in the first place, and to Jessica Mitchell, who oversaw the publishing process.
Zara Mangan and Rachael Mangan, as ever, gave me their unfailing support, and the book is dedicated to my mother, Margaret Mangan, who taught me much of what I know about growing old, both gracefully and disgracefully.
Introduction
Mind, Body and Ageing in Drama, Theatre and Performance
Gerontideology, or acting your age and being as old as you feel
Cultures include in their work self-presentations to their members. On certain collective occasions, cultures offer interpretations. They tell stories, comment, portray, and mirror. Like all mirrors, cultures are not accurate reflectors; there are distortions, contradictions, reversals, exaggerations, and even lies. Nevertheless, self-knowledge, for the individual and collectivity, is the consequence.
(Barbara Myerhoff 1992: 233)
‘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’ (Shakespeare 1974: 1155). And thus Prince Hamlet flashes in front of Polonius’s eyes a mirror in which Polonius may or may not see himself reflected.
Mirrors and theatre go hand in hand, of course. ‘The purpose of playing’, as Hamlet pompously reminded the travelling players who passed through Elsinore, ‘was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’ (Shakespeare 1974: 1161). The status and the reliability of that mirror is variable, debatable and frequently dubious, but on the whole the basic metaphor holds good, and the notion that performance may offer us a way of somehow seeing ourselves is deeply ingrained in our culture.
The metaphor of the mirror, in fact, is an important one for western culture in general. In cultural analysis, the mirror is perhaps most often associated with Lacanian theory, for example, in which the ‘mirror stage’ is the foundation upon which so much else rests. Lacan derived his inspiration from earlier studies comparing the behaviour in front of mirrors of young animals and human children (see Jalley 1998) then applied his own Freudian reading to the ways in which children (typically between the ages of six and eighteen months) attempted to understand, appropriate or control their own reflection in a mirror. This became the basis for his account of the development of human subjectivity.
But mirrors, both metaphorical and literal, are significant for other life stages beyond that of infancy. Not least, as Simone de Beauvoir discovered at the age of forty, they are vivid reminders of the onset of ageing:
The fact that the passage of universal time should have brought about a private, personal metamorphosis is something that takes us completely aback. When I was only forty I still could not believe it when I stood there in front of the looking-glass and said to myself, ‘I am forty.’
(de Beauvoir 1972: 283)
The moment de Beauvoir describes is one which many will recognize, and the unbelief which she articulates is certainly a valid response. After all, the reflection that one sees in even the least distorted of mirrors both is and is not oneself: it is a two-dimensional image whose horizontal but not vertical symmetry has formed the subject of many a quasi-philosophical conundrum. Moreover, the thing you see in the looking glass is also younger than the you that looks at it – albeit only by the fraction of a nanosecond that it takes the light to travel between glass and retina. Why, then, does it look so much older?
De Beauvoir goes on to tease out the implications of her moment of incredulity:
Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: ‘Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?’ ‘False dilemma,’ people have said to me. ‘So long as you feel young, you are young.’ This shows a complete misunderstanding of the complex truth of old age: for the outsider it is a dialectic relationship between my being as he defines it objectively and the awareness of myself that I acquire by means of him. Within me it is the Other – that is to say the person I am for the outsider – who is old: and that Other is myself.
(1972: 283–84)
While de Beauvoir, like Lacan, uses the term the ‘Other’, we should not be misled by this. She is using it in a very different sense from Lacan, and while her own unique style of existentialist thought is influenced by Freud, she is not concerned with developing a neo-Freudian theory of ageing. Her meaning is more akin to the way in which she described woman as the ‘Other’ in The Second Sex , with its connotations of abjection and hostility. But the force of de Beauvoir’s insight lies in its understanding of the multiple consciousness that is involved in the ‘complex truth of old age’, and the difficulty that is involved in struggling to come to terms with its various components. As the brilliant pioneer of age studies, Kathleen Woodward, put it: ‘if the mirror stage of infancy is distinguished by the perception of binary opposition, the mirror stage of old age is more problematic. It is inherently triangular, involving the gaze of others as well as two images of oneself’ (1991: 69).
Culture teaches us at an early age to recognize and interpret the bodily identifiers of biological ageing that we may see in the mirror; and even if, like Hamlet, we hold it not honesty, or at least courtesy, to have them thus set down, we sense in them something that seems reassuringly – or perhaps disquietingly – objective and empirical. However, as recent research suggests, signs such as grey hair and wrinkles do not actually translate wit