Age is a Feeling
This review is from the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe.
Every Fringe needs a Big Tear Jerker, and this year the title unquestionably goes to Haley McGee’s ‘Age Is A Feeling’, a prodigiously wise, sad and beautiful contemplation of a life.
A barefooted McGee sits in a high wooden chair in front of us. Her age is somewhat indeterminate – she could be anywhere from late twenties to early forties – a fact that suits the show, which she performs in a circle of flowery poles, each with a word that corresponds to a story. At intervals throughout, audience members are invited to choose from a selection of the words. The stories that aren’t chosen are discarded, and we never get to hear them (though in some cases we get a brief outline).
It’s kiiind of a gimmick: McGee’s point is that nobody ever truly knows a person, not even themself, and so we’re deliberately presented with an incomplete life. But what we’re presented with doesn’t feel particularly incomplete, and I kind of wonder if McGee just wrote too much material for the show. But it adds a certain artsy structure to proceedings, gives it a form beyond McGee just telling us a yarn - it’s a bit of a gimmick, but it’s not gimmicky.
Anyway: McGee’s narrative starts at her protagonist’s twenty-fifth birthday: she recounts her dad telling her his belief that you can only hire a rental car from that age because it’s only then that your brain has finished developing. Somebody tells her age is a feeling, and McGee’s monologue goes on to...