Nominated in the 2023 Olivier Awards for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre’ (the eligibility criteria for that category is an interesting read), the show in its current brief incarnation in 2026 at Soho Theatre Walthamstow is presented in a venue rather too big to replicate the engaging intimacy I can only presume it had before, either at the Upstairs venue at Soho Theatre Dean Street (capacity 90) or the Anatomy Lecture Theatre (capacity 58), in Summerhall, an Edinburgh Fringe venue and year-round culture and arts hub. Haley McGee’s delivery is understated and subtle, but in a 960-seater theatre, this only creates a distancing effect rather than the living room ambience it might have enjoyed previously.
Audience involvement, as ever, is not the same as audience participation – when McGee tells the audience that ‘you’ will choose the topics the story will focus on, there isn’t a show of hands or an invitation to everyone to cheer for whatever they would like. ‘You’ really means a select few: three people in total, who are invited, one each at the beginning of each of the three sections of this one-act show, to select two large cards out of three or four. On each card is a noun. The nouns are face down at the point of selection, such that the audience member does not know what is written on them. Except they do, because they have been on display on stage, and McGee retrieves them one by one before making her way into the stalls. Almost mind-numbingly slowly, the audience is then informed what the selections were. ‘You’ will hear about A and B, and not about C and D.
But when C and D are namedropped into the narrative anyway – every time – one wonders whether the same story is presented at every performance in the same order. Not so, apparently, with McGee encouraging patrons at the close of the performance to buy her book of the same title as the show to discover for themselves that there were stories left out of this performance. I was not inclined – I’d heard more than enough, especially as the stories that were told became laboriously repetitive by the end. It could be that the play, in its longitudinal story spanning several decades, was trying to demonstrate habitual behaviours supposedly commonplace to people of all ages, thus proving the hypothesis that – wait for it – Age is a Feeling.
In the version I saw and heard, an unnamed character goes through so many relationships over the years that the woman was effectively getting a new partner more often than most people would get themselves a new car. There wasn’t anything remotely groundbreaking in the storyline, and I found it underwhelming. There are two caveats. One: much of the rest of the audience seemed to be chortling away and having themselves a good time. Two: the show succeeds in bringing to the stage a nuanced and detailed account of what it is to be an older woman. Her friends and family die, one by one, until there are no contemporaries left, and the only people she can talk to are those considerably younger than herself. Ultimately, however, seventy-five minutes is a long time to make the point that life is shit and then you die.
Review by Chris Omaweng
Written and performed by Haley McGee, this never-the-same-twice show is a gripping story about how our relationship with mortality shapes the way we live. Charting the seminal moments, rites of passage and turning points in an adult life – your life – from the day you turn 25 through to your death, Age is a Feeling celebrates the glorious and melancholy unknowability of human life.
Writer / Performer – Haley McGee
Director – Mitchell Cushman
Original Director / Dramaturg – Adam Brace (1980-2023)
Scenic Designer – Zoë Hurwitz
Lighting Designer – Dan Carter-Brennan
Sound Designer – Robert Moutrey
AGE IS A FEELING
Soho Theatre Walthamstow
5 to 7 March 2026
