Ageism might still be rife in the Australian workplace, but Sydney Theatre Company is bucking the trend with a play that features two octogenarian leads, in a cast where almost everyone is old enough for an age pension.

Do Not Go Gentle, by local playwright Patricia Cornelius, is named after a Dylan Thomas poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – “rage, rage against the dying of the light” – but uses Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition of 1912 as a metaphor for a group of aged-care residents grappling with the end of their own life journeys.