Exploring the epic of older women's lives: Alexander Zeldin's The Confessions and Jan Vilanova's The Most Beautiful Thing We Can Do as intergenerational dramaturgies of the female life course

Abstract

Five decades after the term ‘herstory’ (Morgan 1970) was proposed, stories which have vindicated the social and historical role of anonymous women have proliferated in different biographical genres. More recently, the devastating effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on older people has also generated the need to generate or examine narratives of ageing (Jewusiak 2023) and to strengthen generational relationships (Ayalon et al. 2020). Despite the technical (and sometimes ethical) challenges posed by the act of representing the lives of others in the ageist and sexist cultures of the so-called advanced world (Friedan 1993; Gullette 2004; Sontag 1972; Woodward 1999), writing about or representing the lives of older women in particular can help restore constructive meanings of female old age from which all generations can benefit.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary framework of ageing studies in its intersections with gender and theatre studies, this paper examines two plays which, in London's and Barcelona's theatrical scenes, have recently placed the lives of anonymous older women in the spotlight: Jan Vilanova's The Most Beautiful Thing We Can Do (produced by Sixto Paz in 2022) and Alexander Zeldin's The Confessions (co-produced by the National Theatre in 2023). While Vilanova's text recreates the life of the author's grandmother, an anonymous Spanish woman who survived two wars and lived as an exile for most of her life, Zeldin's presents the personal journey of the writer and director's own mother, who was born in Australia and found a new life for herself as a divorcée and abuse survivor in London in the 1970s. Through a close reading of the two texts that builds on Roberta Maierhofer's (1999) pivotal concept of “anocriticism,” and in the light of Elinor Fuchs' age-focused interpretation of Brechtian theatre, the article observes the dramatic strategies whereby these two intergenerational ‘herstories’ for the stage can be considered ‘epic’ narratives of the female life course.