Staging age

Staging Age looks at how stage performers deliberately play age, and how their portrayals of older and younger characters are shaped by what audiences expect. Drawing on the dialogue and stage directions of plays from Shakespeare to Beckett, the contributors show how different eras have understood age and how those ideas appear on stage. The book also considers the performer's side of the exchange, tracing both the intentional and the unintentional ways actors convey the full range of human age to the people watching. Presented as the first collection to take up age and performance across several media, it covers theatre, film and dance.