A New Way to Please You (or The Old Law)

RSC Gunpowder Season – explosive Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas of dissent, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005.

A black comedy about a question that haunts us today - what to do about an ageing population.

The Old Law is passed. At the ages of eighty and sixty respectively, all men and women are to be put to death as they are of no further use to society.

Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's A New Way to Please You is a play full of cross-generational fireworks, tackling underlying questions about the law and ageing. It was first published in 1656 (as The Old Law, or A New Way to Please You), but is thought to have been premiered in c.1618.