Harold and Maude & I Heart Alice Heart I @ Glasgay!

Inter-generational love stories are rare enough, but tales about young men falling for older, and especially elderly, women are so unusual that Harold and Maude makes you question whether you’ve ever even come across a similar story before. He’s nineteen, she’s seventy-nine, they fall in love. This information alone is enough to recommend it.

The themes of the 1970s cult film by Hal Ashby are retained in this new stage production by Colin Higgins, and directed by Kenny Miller for this year’s Glasgay! Harold is a compulsive suicide faker, desperately trying to get his mother’s attention and ward off the potential suitors she arranges for him by creating increasingly elaborate suicide stunts. He meets Maude at a funeral and they become involved, despite the superficial differences of their extreme age gap.

I Heart Alice Heart I is another play showing at this year’s Glasgay! which focuses on  love and relationships as experienced by the older generation. Directed by Amy Conroy it tells the story of two women ‘of a certain age’ who fall in love. Steven Thompson, the producer of the festival, explains that this was an intentional decision saying, “It's often where we have the most work to do in transforming opinions in a generation whose values and views are often out of step with the younger more liberated generation.”

He explains that both productions question the values of our society and show the shortcomings of more traditional, conservative points of view, adding, “Glasgay! has always championed broader representation, it’s always been political and it remains socially relevant.”

Shows like Cougar Town and Accidently on Purpose explore relationships between slightly older women and slightly younger men, celebrating cross-generation relationships where the woman is the elder partner. Unfortunately such shows are tailored as if the viewer is supposed to gasp, “But she’s so OLD!” at the sight of a woman in her mid-thirties.

Harold and Maude, however, holds up a woman who is properly ‘old’ and tells you that some young men really do find women like her sexy. In a similar vein I Heart Alice Heart I will surely open audiences up to a whole new understanding of the romantic possibilities of the older generation. These new productions will leave you walking away from the theatre with a whole new appreciation of geriatric sexuality.