Crones in Cabaret: the funny, brave women for whom age is just a song and dance number

Old trout, old goat, old witch, old coot, old cow, old biddy, old bat, old bag, old hag, old shrew, harridan, banshee, battle-axe, cow, harpy, dragon: when devising its show set to open in Sydney next week, the Older Women’s Network (Own) Theatre Group was not at a loss to find pejorative terms for women over 60.

They settled on crone.

The C-word has taken a bad rap over the centuries, but this 21st-century collective of Australian crones are reclaiming the word.

Crones in Cabaret: Not Dead Yet! had its genesis during Covid-19. “And I’m pleased to say all of us are very much still alive and kicking,” says Amanda Armstrong, Own’s coordinator.

Comprised of members aged between 60 and almost 90 (the woman the group identifies as the oldest will not divulge her age), the theatre group had just finished a season at the Adelaide Fringe with Don’t Knock Your Granny – a show that took on elder abuse through song, dance and satire – when the 2020 lockdown hit. Finally there was a break to devise a new show.

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Not Dead Yet! debuted at last year’s Adelaide Fringe, but the show has undergone significant reworking and additions for the Sydney Fringe festival, which opened last weekend.

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As suggested by its title, the show is a celebration of life, but not without some wry whines and guffawing gripes about the injustices endured by mature women who refuse to fade into the background.

The political-is-personal feminist trope has been integral to the theatrical arm of Own since its inception in 1988, when a group of women converged on the lawn of Old Parliament House to campaign against the political invisibility of older women.

The performance, according to the brother-in-law of the late founder and leader of the group, Peggy Hewett, was funded by a bicentennial grant through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The group went on to win an Australian Bicentennial Award.

“Peg believed that humour and song could be a medium for conveying the political message and for expressing sometimes deeply suppressed views,” Rex Hewett wrote in an obituary for his sister-in-law in 2021.

“She cajoled, coached and encouraged older women, some who had never performed in their lives, to deliver their stories and messages from the stage empowering many women, young and old alike to take to the stage and ‘tell it like it is’.”

Armstrong says many of the issues Peggy and her fellow crones took to Canberra more than 35 years ago remain pressing, including elder abuse and domestic violence. Other issues reflect a changing society in which people are living longer and the nuclear family model has become irrelevant to many people’s lived experience along with the conflict between the realities of modern life and society’s stubborn adherence to traditional care roles for women.

Not Dead Yet! confronts the epidemic of poverty and homelessness among older women (there is a song called I Still Call my Mazda Home), the issue of women in their 70s caring for mothers in their 90s, and older women’s vulnerability to scammers.

Age, gender discrimination and dementia may have been issues a quarter of a century ago, but Armstrong doubts an audience back then would have accepted a skit called Dancing with Dementia, with a mother and daughter performing a choreographed routine to Charles Aznavour’s song The Old-Fashioned Way.

Or a response to Pam Ayres’ poetic – and now seemingly-premature and defeatist – surrender to old age from the 1990s, Will I Have to be Sexy at Sixty, with the following contemporary reworking:

My marbles are functioning well
My body looks good in the nude
I still have some charm
And will not come to harm
I always use plenty of lube

“We touch on tough issues, but we can bring in humour and pathos and light-heartedness to get the message across – and it’s very much a social justice message,” says Armstrong.

“Of course we give some issues gravitas and seriousness. By bringing humour to the show, it doesn’t mean we are trivialising something. We also use puppetry – sometimes things are easier to say through the mouth of a puppet.”

Most of the group’s members had no previous theatrical experience before joining Own. Cuc Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee who arrived in Australia in the 1970s, joined after retiring from a 26-year stint working at Lakemba post office. In Not Dead Yet! she performs two solos and she has also become the group’s costume designer.

Fiona Ninnes, co-director of Not Dead Yet! alongside Joy Roberts, saw Own perform at a political rally in Adelaide about six years ago.

“They were so dynamic and so alive, I said, ‘I want to be part of that’. But I was working at the time,” she recalls. “So I said, ‘When I’m finished working, I will come and join you.’”

She didn’t have to wait long. The following year, Ninnes was removed from her job – work she says could have continued doing easily into her 70s – and replaced with younger and cheaper workers.

“But I decided I’m not going to beat my head against a wall,” she says. “I joined Own and have been with it ever since. Women come, women go, the group is constantly changing. But it’s still going after all these years, and a group has to be incredibly special to last that long.”

• Crones in Cabaret: Not Dead Yet! is part of the Sydney fringe festival and plays at 107 Projects Redfern from 11 to 21 September