When you reach a certain age, you begin to realise that your best days are behind you, and time will march on until your inevitable demise. I’m not sure that age is 25, but this is where Haley McGee’s Age Is A Feeling decides to pick up the thread. Playing at Summerhall and directed by Adam Brace, this is a clever but somewhat depressing start to your Edinburgh Fringe day.
McGee sits atop a wooden lifeguard chair, surround by tall potted plants, with a postcard attached to each. There are thirteen of these postcards, each one representing a story to be told, the audience will, over the course of the performance, choose six, the remainder left untold, for this performance at least.
At this performance the six stories chosen by the audience were; ‘Bus’, ‘Hospital’, ‘Book’, ‘Inbox’, ‘Dog’ and ‘Crabapple’. I am reliably informed that ‘Egg’ and ‘Diner’ are the best of the stories, but like life, fate took this performance down a different path.
Our six stories were woven together to paint the picture of a life lived from age 25 to death at the ripe old age of 90. The narrative is pieced together from interviews with hospice workers and conversations with mystics, and while that provides us with some rich storytelling, it also presents a problem.
There’s no real protagonist, the situations are too specific for us to always identify with what’s happening, and at times too vague for us to associate them with one central character. This isn’t helped with every sentence starting ‘you will’, is McGee talking to the audience or some ethereal character?
The delivery is also too repetitive, with every line delivered in the same tone as the last it’s difficult to feel the emotion or differentiate the light and shade, not that there’s a great deal of light to find, Age Is A Feeling is determined to remind you at every available opportunity that you and everyone you love will die.
The concept is a nice idea, the audience are left wondering what they missed with the stories that weren’t chosen (a playtext containing them all is on sale after the performance). Later parts of the performance reference earlier points, so McGee is obviously adapting all the time to take account of what’s been chosen, it’s clearly a skilful performance.
Age Is A Feeling misses an opportunity to be a really emotional and heartfelt celebration of life, while it tries to highlight that your age shouldn’t prevent you from living life to the fullest, it ultimately just reminds us of our own mortality.
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