It isn’t often that a tea dance sparks a revolution. But there is a revolutionary vibe fizzing around the edges of the elderly couples waltzing inside the small Chesil Theatre, Winchester. They are there to mark the launch of the Prime Theatre Company, a professional outfit that provides work for bus-passage actors, directors and writers.

Among them is Ros Liddiard, the company’s artistic director and founder, an unlikely-looking revolutionary in a red and burgundy 1920s-style outfit. But she talks tough.

“It is this celebrity culture,” she says. “It is an ageist business and it is youth-orientated and we need to create work for ourselves. This company is a drop in the ocean, but it’s a way to start things off.”

Staffed by oversixties, the Arts Council England-funded company will embark on small-scale tours, the next of which begins later this month, with Aleksei Arbuzov’s Old World. Among its patrons are the actors Edward Woodward and his wife Michele Dotrice. Surely they’ve never struggled for work?

“I’m lucky,” says Woodward, 77. “I like to do two good jobs a year and the last few years I have done just that. There are one or two older actors who work constantly, but very few.”

Dotrice, who is “going to be 60 any minute now”, has had a harder time of it. “I was type-cast as Betty [in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em] and it took a long time to break that mould. People do tend to put you into categories. I got into a rut playing housekeepers who died,” she recalls.

While veterans view television as the most ageist medium, the stage is little better, apparently.

“Thank God for Alan Ayckbourn,” Jean Rogers trills down the phone from her digs in Sheringham, Norfolk, where she is appearing in Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves. “His plays have equal numbers of men and women spread over age groups.”

Rogers, who played Dolly Skilbeck in Emmerdale, is vice-president of Equity and has been fighting for European money to investigate the job market for actresses. Ageism will also be addressed. Some research already exists. In 2005 a survey team asked Equity’s 35,000 members whether they were working on one specific day. Of the 25 per cent who replied, only 36 per cent aged over 50 said that they were.

What’s the view from the West End? Janet Brown, best known for impersonating Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and Timothy Bateson, who was in the first production of Waiting for Godot in the 1950s, are both aged over 80 and are to appear in The Country Wife at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Surely they aren’t finding it hard to get work?

“I couldn’t say that, no,” says Bateson. “Apart from anything else, the older you get the more the competition dies off.”

Brown, too, remains busy. As a cabaret performer she always has her act “with her”. But she adds: “I do feel for fellow actors who are brilliant but need to have the right part.”

In the dressing rooms at the Victoria Palace, Anne Emery, 75, is enjoying a long run playing Grandma in Billy Elliot. No revolution here. Just mints. “I’m still happy. Everyone’s lovely. I give them peppermints,” she says. “I’m really, busy. I am ginger-peachy.”

Perhaps the revolution is a little way off yet.

Old World, Rondo Theatre, St Saviours Road, Bath (www.primetheatre.com 01225 463362), Thur-Sat, then touring

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