A gentle, loving, heart-breaking, and yet regularly funny affair.
📍Summerhall – Anatomy Lecture Theatre
📅 Aug 3-28
🕖 12:10pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 1 hour 10 minutes
👥 Writer/Performer: Haley McGee
🎬 Haley McGee – writer/performer
🎥Director/dramaturg – Adam Brace
🔨Scenic designer – Zoë Hurwitz
💰 From £8.00 (Preview), £11.00 thereafter
🎂 16+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet
Hayley McGee, creator of the hit-show — and now book — the Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale — switches her attentions from other halves to the other side. Death is coming for us all, but like a ghost of Christmas-yet-to-come Hayley has come to tell the story of your future.
Her, or rather your tale, begins at 25, and over the next hour and 10 minutes, she narrates your fate through to its inevitable end, a rich, but relatable tapestry of triumph and disaster, love, loss, family and friends, of the progressive betrayal of the ageing body, and of seeking peace with the unknowability of life. ‘Age is a feeling’, she says, ‘you feel it.’
Periodically repairing to the summit of a life-guard’s chair, Hayley gazes out upon both audience, an oracle holding court with her devotees.
The factor-x in this narrative stems from the circumscription of tall plants arrayed about Hayley’s chair. Each stalk bares a postcard, on each a solitary word. Three times, Hayley will harvest a few to present before an audience member, inviting them to choose one. Those chosen will be told, will be known to the audience. Those not selected will go unspoken, no matter how weighty, or heart-rending.
It’s a simple, but remarkably effective device, bringing the needed elasticity to Hayley’s attempt to create an every-soul for the audience to inhabit. No one knows everything about a person, not even themselves.
McGee is a superb performer, utterly invested in the story from first to last moments. She pulls the audience inside their story with an almost mesmeric intimacy. Her emotional landscape is a palpable creature in the room, wrapping the watcher in devastation, joy, and the full spectrum in between.
Yes, this is very much a middle-class, educated reality, but there’s enough humanity to create relevance to most audiences.
Time and again, Hayley presents ‘you’ with seminal moments that invite change; but change is hard, even though it’s only a choice away. Habits recur, nihilism threatens, and yet, where there’s life, there’s hope. No, McGee avers, it’s never too late. This is a serious show, with a serious message.
The show never lulls, never squanders dramatic potential, and indicates Director Adam Brace as a dramaturg with a fine feel for both pace, and pathos. Age is a Feeling is a gentle, loving, heart-breaking, and yet regularly funny affair: an audacious attempt to capture the full absurdity of the human condition.
(Image Credit: Thea Courtney)
