For everyone, growing up, and the memory of growing up, can be painful. Relationships change, come and go, and people drift together and just as easily drift apart. It is a chance meeting between two estranged male friends which reignites a strained, non-conventional friendship in this powerful solo piece, Age.
Performed by Aaron Rooney, Logan Jones’s script focuses on two boys who, now men, reflect individually upon the growth and devastating breakdown of their best-friendship, more than a decade after severing ties. It is a chance meeting in an airport lounge which the two, who are never named, reconnect, with its awkwardness teasing at something more intimate and unsettling as, over the hour, the piece gradually unpacks how they grew to be friends, and why they grew apart.
Performing as both men, through various stages of their childhood, teenage years and adulthood, Rooney is exceptional at maintaining an energy which makes Age an enthralling watch. It is a little Blood Brothers-esque, without the twins swapped at birth bit. One boy, timid and shy, comes from a rich home, while the other comes from a working-class divorced family, with hints that it is also abusive. In their own way, neither boy is happy with their situation, and eventually find comfort in each other, sparking a friendship that lasts for a decade before a couple of sharp decisions, one impulsive, one cruel, change their bond irreparably.
Their growth into adolescence is marked with societal and emotional pressures. As the anxious boy, Rooney’s subtle gestures and head nods point towards the character’s reluctance to accept themselves, whereas the brash bravado of his loud-mouth friend is a clear deflective technique of its own. Jones’s writing means neither character comes out of the relationship the victor, or perhaps, as solely to blame either, and that is testament to the careful skill of Rooney’s delivery to draw out each character’s complexities with subtlety.
Under Ella McKeown’s direction, the piece is mostly tightly pulled together, sequencing both men’s narratives in a manner which enables the tension between the pair to erupt organically, which Rooney does with remarkable success. This is heightened too by Marie Colahan’s gorgeous lighting, with transitions slow and lingering, representing the manner in which the past’s pain still hovers over both men over a decade later.
There are some clumsier bits, however. The quick changes between characters can be a little disorientating, as can the decision for one character to misremember previously explained moments, often just by relabelling a place or person incorrectly. It is a neat idea but one that feels ineffectual until its eventual recognition in the play’s final moments.
The decision to include a slapstick fight between the pair works but feels a cliché for a solo piece like this, while Jones’s script, largely effective in crafting the vulnerability of both characters, is a little too shocking at times. Some lines, particularly about a sinister older brother, are there just to propel an eventual plot device, which pulls the piece out of its intimate focus between these two men.
That said, Age builds to a moving and poignant conclusion, underscored by the deft inclusion of ‘dad rock’ that mirrors the transition of the pair from hormonal teens to regretful men. Rooney’s extraordinary individual performance reignites the triumph and traumas of the friendship between the pair, which had, by both, been extinguished by time.
A moving, gripping piece of theatre.
