Margaret Tyzack has joined the growing clamour of actors, including Harriet Walter, who are drawing attention to the lack of representation of older women on stage and TV screens. The 77-year-old Tyzack, who has just won an Olivier for her role in The Chalk Garden, told the Stage that she is amazed when she comes across a part written for a woman over 70 who has control of brain and bladder. She decried the lack of roles for older women, saying that if they do exist, they are often described as "crone" or "witch-like". ("Insults," she said, "that if they were used towards any other group in society, people would be up in arms.") Tyzack is not alone. A survey published by the Stage last week found that over 80% of people felt that women over the age of 40 were not represented on stage or on screen.
The balance will be slightly improved with the arrival of Madame de Sade in the West End, which has four over-40s in major roles: Judi Dench, Deborah Findlay, Frances Barber and Jenny Galloway. Elsewhere, Felicity Kendal and Diana Rigg are about to appear in The Last Cigarette and Hay Fever respectively at Chichester, while Helen Mirren and Tyzack are appearing in Phèdre at the National in early June.
Interestingly, all these plays hail from another era, and a quick look at the London theatre listings confirms what the survey suggests – that while older men continue to play a wide range of parts, women become less visible with age. A Europe-wide study published late last year found that women actors earn less and have shorter careers than their male counterparts.
Shakespeare may be partly to blame for writing King Lear rather than Queen Lear (a situation that at least one feminist playwright has addressed, and as Kathryn Hunter proved, gender is no bar to the role). But the few classical roles there are for older women are not safe either: the current directorial trend is for younger Gertrudes and Lady Macbeths, and it's not uncommon to see Lady Capulet represented as a gymslip mum turned desperate housewife.
I certainly wouldn't want a return to the days when mature actresses were cast as Juliet (Sarah Bernhardt was playing the 18-year-old Joan of Arc well into her 70s, and with a wooden leg), but I do think the idea that Hedda Gabler can no longer be played by anyone a day over 28 is absurd. Great acting can persuade you of anything. Peggy Ashcroft was 53 when she played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, opposite a young Peter O'Toole, who described wonderingly how during the performance "the years kept sprinkling off her".
So how can women be represented more equally? Well, you can't make writers create cracking parts for the over-40s, and perhaps even if they do, they are sometimes under pressure to trade them in for a younger model with more cleavage. Writing plays is, on the whole, a young person's art, and the young are mostly interested in themselves, although Polly Stenham wrote a role in That Face for an older woman which Lindsay Duncan fell upon like a starving tiger.
I'm inclined to think that it may just be a matter of time. The current representation of women on both stage and screen still falls back upon long-outdated stereotypes, hailing from an age when 55-year-olds were indeed found on Saga holidays rather than taking skydiving lessons and running businesses. Women may not be represented at the highest echelons in the theatre, but with more and more women writing for the theatre and directing, it may simply be that as the current generation moves towards middle age, their interests and concerns may drive change.
In the meantime, of course, I could point out that while older women may be underrepresented on our stages, those of all ages from ethnic minorities are often even less visible – not just on stage, but backstage, running buildings and in the audience.
