★★★★★
“Age is a feeling. You feel it.” So goes the mantra of Hayley McGee’s wildly successful solo show, which takes a deep dive into the life of one, unnamed woman. It is of course also a shallow dive, as we can’t learn everything in the space of an hour—nor can any one person know everything about their own life. We will learn fragments, moments and recurring themes and like all stories, it’ll end in death.
McGee’s central character begins her tale on her 25th birthday, and the subsequent show projects the entirety of her life in the future: from bad teethed boyfriends to unknowable fathers and friends who fall out and back into your life. It allows McGee to cover more or less the entire range of modern human (Canadian, female) experience in remarkably short time, whilst also making the show intensely personal to her single character’s life. The twist here (or gimmick to be uncharitable) is that the audience picks which of these tales we will here: the rest are discarded. The simple but telling design by Zoe Hurwitz takes the form of a houseplant forest, meaning that every time a story is rejected, a plant is felled with a casual: ‘anyway’. Loss is built into the set design and the storytelling.
It’s a wistful but also hilarious piece, filled with pathos (if you get the dog story, prepare yourself) and frequent wit (using a tin mug of water). McGee is a mesmerising performer able to switch between the two emotions like it’s nothing. Her writing is sprightly and lets the joys and horrors of growing old and seeing all your alternate pathways branch off settle gently but devastatingly on the audience. It’s also a marathon performance with the feats of memory required to switch between different stories on each night sending a shiver through the spine of any actors in the audience.
McGee’s play is a gently seductive meditation on aging, a life well lived and the ways in which we view our futures and betray, or befriend, ourselves. It is improved even more by the sense of jeoparady in its form and the mix of the sepulchral and lively in its set design. Thought-provoking and watchable, it’s a little Fringe gem; an encapsulation of a life in sixty minutes.
Words by Issy Flower
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