The older woman at the centre of dystopia: dramatizing the perils of ageism in Emma Adams’ Animals

This article presents an age-centered analysis of Animals (2015), a dystopian play by the British playwright Emma Adams in which men and women over 60 are deemed redundant and useless by a dystopian society that either ordains their murder or marginalizes them completely. Framed within the field of ageing and theatre studies and its intersection with gender theories, our analysis aims to examine the position of the play’s older female protagonists in a dystopian world infested with ageism and sexism, which deprives older people (and particularly older women) of their humanity and divests them of their generational meaning. On the whole, the article intends to explore the political and symbolic significance of (female) older characters in new (and demodystopic) dramaturgies of old age, especially with the ultimate objective to search for alternative cultural narratives and conceptualizations of later life that help reconstruct the value of ageing and of intergenerational relationships.