Age Is a Feeling

A live story about time needed a sound world that could hold memory without fixing the performance in place.

Age Is a Feeling is written and performed by Haley McGee. The show charts the turning points of an adult life and is deliberately never exactly the same twice, making uncertainty and choice part of its form as well as its subject.

Robert created the sound design and composition around that structure. The work needed to support a highly intimate relationship between performer and audience while also giving the production a musical and sonic architecture capable of carrying shifts in time, scale and emotion.

The result is a score and sound world that can sit quietly beneath the storytelling, then open the space when the production needs a larger emotional or theatrical gesture. Rather than functioning as decoration between scenes, sound helps establish the atmosphere in which memory, mortality and possibility can accumulate.

The production premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022, where it won a Fringe First, before sold-out Soho Theatre runs. It later travelled internationally, including Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto in 2024, and returned to Soho Theatre Walthamstow in 2026.