Excerpt from At Your Age?/

[BREDA’s SON, now dressed in everyday clothes, appears from the darkness of the left stage wall, and sits at the table centre stage behind BREDA.  He begins to plait her long, peppered grey hair].

BREDA: [smiles at him in greeting, then says absently] The older the woman, the shorter the hair.

SON:           Mmm?

BREDA:      My mother would say: ‘The older the woman, the shorter the hair.’

SON:           You’re young so, according to your mother.

BREDA [laughs]:  That’s a lovely way of taking it.  Thank you.

BREDA:      Or: ‘the higher the hair, the lower the skirt.’

SON:          I haven’t heard that one before.

BREDA:      The lower the skirt, the higher the hair.  Or no.   The longer the skirt – the shorter the hair, the older -.

CHORUS:  While BREDA is speaking, a chorus of three men and three women, all dressed in black, emerge from various positions in the audience. They talk over each other, one couple repeating ‘the longer the skirt, the shorter the hair’; another repeating ‘the higher the hair, the lower the skirt; and the third pair saying ‘the older the woman the shorter the hair.’  They come together down right of the stage talking aside in a huddle.  They are agitated and divide into separate groups at either side of the stage, the members shifting between groups and shouting across to each other.   Their conversation becomes a general mumble, with occasional words like ‘longer’, ‘shorter’, ‘skirt’, ‘older’ becoming more audible.  They eventually return to their positions in the audience, still mumbling.

About At Your Age?
At Your Age?! is an ethnodrama developed in collaboration with UCC’s School of Applied Social Studies and School of Drama.  It explores ageism and features the verbatim words of six older women taken from focus group discussions and drama workshops held at UCC.  The Age-ACTED (Ageism Challenged Through Ethnodrama) project from which it was derived was funded by the Irish Research Council. A reading of Part I by five of the women was extremely well received by a full house at the Granary Theatre in January, 2023.

Rehearsed Reading of Part I at The Granary Theatre in January, 2023

Directed by:
Fionn Woodhouse, Department of Theatre, UCC

Written in collaboration with:
Eleanor Bantry White, School of Applied Social Studies, UCC

And the verbatim words and contributions of:
Joanna Gill
Máire Corr Kelly
Michelle Whelan
Norma Foley
Pauline Cudmore
Rosemary Meade

Funded by the Irish Research Council