LEGENDARY Canberra composer and musical identity, Judith Clingan, is 78 this year, and it’s got her thinking about, well, ageing.

Clingan, the first Canberra Artist of the Year, founded the Canberra Children’s Choir, Gaudeamus Music For Everyone (now Music for Canberra), the Canberra Recorder and Early Music Society, Ladies’ Mantle and the Young Music Society, to name a few.

Now, under the umbrella of her organisation, Wayfarers Australia, she is staging her own 90-minute play, “The Threshold”, which deals with questions of ageing and dying.

Set in the Australian Centre for Christianity & Culture, the multi-media production will involve top musicians Johanna McBride, Andrew Purdam and David Cassat, a chorus of 16, a string quartet, piano, hammer dulcimer, recorder, flute, clarinet, pitch bells, and gongs.

And while she has composed 14 short musical pieces for the work, she is adamant that it’s a play, not a piece of musical theatre.

Clingan’s own pictures will be projected on to the walls of the centre, which will be set up like a cafe with tables, tablecloths, flowers, and tea and biscuits on offer.

I caught up with her at her home in Rivett where she told me that she’s been thinking about the question of ageing for some time.

In March 2021 she despatched a list of 14 questions to women of her age, asking them what they thought. A lot gave written answers. Some rang and some visited her at home to talk directly to her.

Then in May 2021, Clingan ran her tricycle into a curb and found herself in hospital for an extended period, where people brought her books on ageing, she read up on the subject online and wrote the first two bits of music.

Once out of hospital, she completed her script, which revolves around four older women – Prima, Secunda, Tertia and Alta, who talk about life and what age does to your memories in a “slightly funny” manner to which Clingan thinks people over 70 will relate.

The characters, played by Micki Beckett, Gill Christie, Alanna Maclean and Janet Berger, are emblematic of different stages in awareness. One has just lost her mum, another is facing imminent death, another is a gossip and another a sort of wise woman.

The play also examines what the end of life might mean – a simple cessation of being, a Buddhist view, the heaven and hell of the Abrahamic religions which posits a heaven and a hell, the more liberal idea of universal salvation or the Anthroposophical idea of reincarnation.

There is some very personal poetry written by Clingan, four poems by her Scottish friend Mandy McDonald, words by Canberra poet Hazel Hall and snatches of Rabindranath Tagore and Shakespeare.

“There are also chunks of real stories and quite a bit of my own family’s stories,” she says, with reference to her poet mother Marian, after whom Clingan Street in Wright was named.

But in weaving together realities, she found she touched few nerves, as the actors felt perhaps they knew the real-life characters, though she was able to assuage their concerns.

“It’s not a typical play, it’s not events moving on, but everyone feels calm at the end,” Clingan says.

“The Threshold”, Australian Centre for Christianity & Culture, Barton, March 4 and  March 5 (11am).