Old age and motherhood in April De Angelis' After Electra

The issue of roles for older actresses has been widely discussed in recent years, with a host of outstanding performers speaking out about a scarcity of arduous, testing parts in the English repertoire. It is why productions such as the recent De Angelis' After Electra (2015) with the emotional lives of older women placed centre stage are so important. Building on De Angelis' own critical work, recent literature on the twenty-first-century British feminist drama and cultural gerontology, the present chapter aims to analyse the ways in which ageing and motherhood are represented in After Electra which seems both to challenge and reflect long-standing assumptions about late life and femininity.