Charlotte Cornwell, the actress sister of John le Carré, welcomes a new theatre company that gives a voice to the enriching stories of older people

This week I open in a Marguerite Duras play, The Lovers of Viorne, playing a woman who killed her cousin, chopped up her body and scattered it over a railway. It’s an extraordinary part that asks some pretty dark questions about what ordinary people are capable of. But it’s also written for an actress in her late fifties and that’s pretty uncommon.

It’s the first production by Frontier Theatre, a new initiative established by James Roose-Evans, who founded Hampstead Theatre in 1959, with the aim of putting on work for older actors in their sixties and seventies. Because there isn’t that much work out there for actors of retirement age and it’s a terrible problem, particularly for women.

Unless you're Judi Dench or Juliet Stevenson, it can be terribly depressing as an older actress, waiting at home for the phone to ring. I was born in 1949 and I remember when I was young that anyone who was 60 was really old. They were done. They were going to retire and put their feet up and play golf. Now, people have still got it at 75.