A wise and witty health warning...
Age Is A Feeling (Soho Theatre)
Verdict: This really is your life
★★★★I
WRITER and performer Haley McGee, barefoot in jeans, is perched high on a ladder chair, like a lifeguard, circled by a clockface of 12 tall flower stems, each bearing a card with a word in handwritten capitals which the audience will choose to determine the course of the next hour.
She confesses she’s feeling her age — a feeling which begins at 25 with the realisation that one day you are going to die — and the clock starts ticking.
The night I was in, the audience chose HOSPITAL, OYSTER, PLANE, DINER, BOOK and DOG, leaving BUS, EGGS, TEETH, INBOX, FIST and CRAB APPLE not just enticingly untold, but also underlining the distressing truth that even those closest can only be party to parts of another person’s life. Haley tells of loves, hopes, joys, friends, fallouts, failures and fears, her delivery so vivid and heartfelt, it seems that the stories must surely be hers. Except they can’t be, because she is still only 36 and her tale continues until the final gasp.
This is an imagined life, looked at on the level, with truly breathtaking wisdom: devoid of sentimentality, yet filled with buckets of tears and laughter.
Between chapters, she hits a tin with a stick, a bell tolling the physical ageing process as your teeth shift, you bruise more and your hands become your mother’s. ‘Age is a feeling. You have to look forward,’ she urges.
It made me think of the extraordinarily poignant photograph of our beloved Queen as she held out her bruised hand to shake that of the new Prime Minister.
Seriously smart and smarting storytelling.