Jo Caird: Where Are All the Older Performers?
Among
my theatrical bêtes noires
is young actors playing older characters for no good reason. At its
best, on those occasions when the young actor in question is
talented, this looks peculiar (Lucy Farrett, right, in Twenty
Minutes to Nine is a good example of this). At its worst,
when the audience is presented with a young person with talcum
powder-dusted hair and drawn-on wrinkles, it’s laughable and
undermines the good work of the rest of the cast. Either way, it’s a
distraction from the drama and rarely excusable.
If
you’re a young company putting on a show and you don’t have any older
actors among your ranks, then opt to stage a play – either an
existing piece or one of your own devising – with a dramatis
personae entirely composed of young actors.
If that doesn’t appeal, cast an older actor from outside the group.
Either way, your creative ambitions needn’t be limited.
I saw
plenty of this at the Edinburgh Fringe last month, and although it
irritated me whenever I came across it, it did flag up an interesting
issue: the lack of performers over the age of 35 (I’m defining
‘older’ as 35-plus here – please don’t get upset with me about it,
it’s just for the sake of this argument and just for the record, I
don’t consider 35 old) at the festival, and in particular the
underrepresentation of older women performers.
The
Fringe is undoubtedly a young person’s game and this shouldn’t come
as a big surprise. A major proportion of the companies at the
festival each year are students or recent graduates after all, and
the comedy programme is largely composed of bright young things
trying to make a name for themselves. Young people are more likely to
be ready to put up with the far from ideal living conditions at the
Fringe (anyone who has slept in a cupboard or on a kitchen floor in
an overcrowded flat to try to keep costs down will know what I’m
talking about), and have fewer professional and personal commitments
that might stop them from flitting off to Scotland for a month to
mire themselves in debt.
In
some respects, this demographic make-up is to the benefit of the
festival: the enthusiasm of the thousands of young people at the
Fringe makes it a very vibrant place, and there’s a wonderful buzz
that accompanies the discovery of exciting new work and careers
taking off. But that’s not the whole story. The fact that the Fringe
is unfavourable to older theatre-makers and comics means that
Edinburgh’s arts offering is less diverse than it should be (for more
on diversity at the Fringe, see below for producer Steve Roe’s excellent blog on the subject) and audiences are missing out on the experience
and talents of older artists.
What’s
even more troubling is that out of the limited numbers of older
performers at the festival, women are horribly underrepresented, in
both theatre and comedy. Out of the 40 or so shows I saw in Edinburgh
in August (not really a fair sample I realise, but enough to allow me
to comment anecdotally), I spotted only five women who I would
estimate to be over the age of 35, although all but one only just
scraped into that category. This compared to around 20 older male
performers.
There
are probably a number of possible explanations for this disparity,
but I fear the chief reason is to do with the fact that in most
families, even those in which both parents pursue careers in the
liberal arts, it is still the woman who has primary responsibility
over childcare, making a month away from home at the Fringe an
impossibility. In single-parent families, it’s even more difficult of
course. That’s not to say there aren’t female performers who make
this work, but they are few and far between. It all makes for a depressingly narrow set of options for female performers and audiences alike, and a situation that I fear is not going to improve any time soon given this government’s fondness for budget cuts that affect women disproportionally and make it even harder for them to pursue careers after having children. Looks like I might have to reconcile myself to my old bête noire after all.
