article: "We are on top of it." In his time, Hum has worked with Sir Alec Guinness, Joyce Grenfell and Sir Jonathan Miller. He did not share the stage with those greats but instead, as a lighting technician, he was responsible for throwing the spotlight on some of British theatre's leading stars. Now Hum is finally stepping into the spotlight himself - albeit with the aid of a walking stick. He is appearing in Anniversary at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds with four other local people of advancing years from the theatre's senior citizens group Heydays. They are joined by five seasoned professional dancers whose ages range from the 50s to 70s - a section of the population rarely seen in the lithe world of professional dance. What the show's routines lack in athletic abandon they make up for in playful spirit and poignant suggestion. As well as dancing, the participants deliver monologues that reflect on aspects of their lives. "The memory's not what it was," Hum says of learning his lines. "At one time I'd swallow chunks of texts like a rabbit, but these days I have to hammer it in." When Anniversary director Alan Lyddiard left his job as artistic director of Northern Stage in Newcastle in 2005, he thought there would be no shortage of theatre work. But, after returning from travelling as the financial crisis hit, he realised he was wrong. "I decided I had to create my own work," he says. "I was then approaching 60 and I thought, why don't I try and start a company of people like me - people that were feeling that maybe their careers were sort of coming to an end? "I thought maybe I could say that their careers were just beginning. "I thought of myself as an emerging artist at the age of 60, trying to create a new type of theatre. A theatre that was specifically to be created by older people, but for everybody." Lyddiard founded Performance Ensemble two years ago and Anniversary is the theatre company's biggest production to date. At 67, does he feel that older performers and artists are neglected by the mainstream? "A little bit. I feel slightly patronised at times. You know, 'Dear old thing, is he still around?' I feel slightly that people forget. "I think there is a feeling in the arts that you've always got to be looking for the new, looking for the young, looking for the new ideas. This is why I call myself an emerging artist, because I want to be new." Older performers can bring qualities to a show that bright young things simply do not possess, he believes. "They have an incredible experience of being on a stage, being seen by an audience, having lived a long life and knowing that they have an internal knowledge, an internal understanding, of what is possible. "They're not necessarily able to stretch their legs quite as high as they used to, but [they are] able to present in performance quality something rich and deep and something that's
summary: "We are not over the hill" declares 87-year-old James Humphrey Haslem Crawshaw - known to all as Hum - from the stage during rehearsals for his theatrical debut.