Barbara is having a row with the female head of a residential care unit. Barbara is angry because her husband Ron has been given an anti-psychotic drug to treat his dementia without her knowledge.

She demands a proper review of her husband’s treatment, attended by a doctor. She’s not going to take no for an answer.

“I am a bloody tiger when it comes to our Ron,” she says, stroking her husband’s arm.

At one point momentary panic ensues when Ron picks up a pot of hot tea. “Assam, Assam,” Ron repeats. He proceeds to name the various tea-growing areas of India and Ceylon and the teas that grow there.

Barbara soothes him and points out that her husband had worked in tea-growing since the age of 15. It’s something he knows, something that makes him come alive rather than threaten others.

This is not a scene from a real care home for the elderly but from Home Sweet Home, a two-hour play by Emma Adams about ageing and the problems older people have being accepted as functioning human beings in spite of their ailments.

The novel thing about the play, which opens at Bradford’s Ukrainian Centre next month, is that the cast of 27 includes a chorus and a choir totalling 20, comprising of people aged 58 to 82. For most of them this will be the first time they have performed in a play with professional actors.

“We have been working on this project for two years,” said creative producer Deborah Dickinson. “We put the call out. We wanted people to have an opportunity to do something they had never done before.

“The hardest thing for us was to choose the four from Bradford for the chorus. They had to be happy to go on tour in Stockton for a week and London for a week,” she added.

Those four are Joe Dooling, Florence Remmer, Chris Hyland and Brenda Halliday. During a break in rehearsals at Freedom Studios in Little Germany, I asked Joe and Brenda who had impelled them to take such a big step out their comfort zones.

Brenda said: “I saw this in the T&A asking for volunteers to take part, so I came along here on a Thursday. I used to do youth club things years ago, but I have never been in a professional play. It’s just another interest.”

Brenda, from Apperley Bridge, who used to work for David Hockney’s brother Paul when he had an accountancy firm in Shipley, was being modest. During the rehearsal I watched her perform sleight of hand with a square of purple cloth, a trick taught her by a member of Bradford Magic Circle.

Sixty-five-year-old Joe, from Wibsey, said he had never attempted anything like this before in his life. Like Brenda, he too performed a trick with a strip of coloured cloth. It brought a whoop of collective support and approval from the cast and Freedom Studios associate director Tom Wright.

Joe responded to the same appeal in the T&A that had attracted Brenda’s attention. Like her he was looking for something else, something different to do with his life.

“I thought ‘I’ll have a go at that’”, he said. “I have been retired for five years. I go to the gym three times a week and I’ve applied for voluntary work at BRI. This is stretching me, I am floundering. I am not used to doing multi-task things.”

This chorus line of eight (the other four members are from Stockton and London), sing, dance, do tricks and offer the audience tea and biscuits at the beginning and end of the play and during the interval.

“I do sports, but this is a totally different world to me. I am hoping to get a taste for it, that’s why I am hanging in. If you don’t try you don’t know, do you?” he added.

That would be a perfect sub-title for the play which Brenda said was concerned with changing the stereotypes that young people in particular have of older people.

“They think we just sit about with a shawl round our shoulders and knit. But we do marathons, we go walking,” she said. They sing, dance and do magic tricks as well. In short, older people are capable of making a contribution outside the family, being active and having fun.

The pains of age exceed the pleasures, we think; what is ageing other than an accumulation of years and ailments? But most people tend to feel much younger than their chronological age. As Brenda Halliday said, “70 is the new 50.”

Emma Adams was commissioned to write the play by Freedom Studios and Entelecky Arts in Deptford, London. She said the idea was to raise awareness of issues associated with ageing in an entertaining but edgy theatrical experience.

She said: “It’s not that anti-psychotic drugs are used for dementia but how they are used that’s just not right. The other side of this play is that although people in the care industry do care, there are imperfections.

“We are encouraged to see older people, but the challenge is to see them as people.”

She’ll be thrilled if for people of a certain age this play proves to be inspiring and perhaps even life-transforming.

From what I saw in the rehearsal room in Little Germany it is funny, poignant and life-affirming.

Home Sweet Home runs from April 1 to 5 at the Ukrainian Centre, 169 Legrams Lane, Bradford, with three shows at 7.30pm and two at 1.30pm. Tickets are available at brad.ac.uk/ theatre/whats-on/buy-tickets/ or on (01274) 432000.