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 try to convey how somebody’s entire post-25 life might feel, from insecurity and loneliness in their younger years to a sort of beatific inner peace and acceptance of death towards the end.
Her narrator’s life is marked by a series of defining relationships: an intense friendship with a vivacious but troubled woman, who she becomes estranged from for much of their lives; an almost-marriage to a man she falls for intensely but walks away from; a lack of children, which she regrets but gets over, eventually burying herself in her nieces.
There are no given names or specifics - we’re never told what the narrator’s name or job is, and at one point she explicitly says it doesn’t matter who the biography that her dad wrote was actually of. It has the air of autobiography, until it becomes clear that this can’t possibly be the case.
As a phrase, ‘age is a feeling’ is obviously a truism designed to say you’re only as only as you feel. McGee doesn’t really hold with that: her monologue broadly suggests how you feel does correspond to how old you are. And this is what makes the tears jerk: her character is carrying so much baggage in her youth and middle years, and to some extent makes a hash of her life for reasons that she later realised were unnecessary.
She finds a wisdom at the end of her days that would have helped her decades earlier. But that’s not how life works. It’s sad to look back at our own pasts through the protagonist’s prism of letting go. And the ending is also sad because, frankly, we’ve spent a lot of time with this character and it’s a wrench when her time is up.
Of course it’s contrived: McGee shares the wisdom of old age that she herself is decades away from. But that’s fiction for you! And McGee’s intense but contemplative performance really sells it, ‘Age is a Feeling’ is a beautiful work that makes you feel every age in its protagonist’s long life.