At Your Age?! and AgeACTED: a theoretical exploration of an ethnodrama on ageism

Abstract

This article provides a theoretical exploration of an ethnodrama project on ageism entitled AgeACTED (Ageism Challenged Through Ethnodrama). The theatre script, At Your Age?!, which was the output of AgeACTED uses the verbatim words of six ‘third age’ women aged between 64 and 75. This article explores the script and discussions that informed it using the Terror Management Theory of ageism and the threat of death, animality, and insignificance, which it describes. The difficult discussions around the representation of death and the fourth age indicated that, for the women in AgeACTED, fear of the fourth age was more significant than fear of death. The article explores how the women framed their successful ageing in the third age and contrasted this with a stereotyped and feared fourth age imaginary. This future imaginary served as both a source of fear and as the motivation to avoid it by prolonging the third age. Thus, while AgeACTED set out to explore how the women were subjected to ageism, it found that ageist stereotypes were also internalised within their ageing process, particularly in relation to the fourth age. This article highlights the urgent need for a re-evaluation of fourth age institutionalised care. It also argues, however, for the promotion of more diversified, less distressing imaginaries of the fourth age, and alternative sources of self-esteem and resilience for those in the third age, which are not reliant upon the avoidance of, and comparison with, a stereotyped and detrimental imaginary.