What exactly is acting your age?And who decides?These are the questions Alan Cumming has been grappling with for a very long time.
Alan Cumming said, ‘I’m constantly told, even now in my sixth decade, that I am child-like or puckish, and yet at the same time I’m also called a silver fox and a daddy. I think we all get really mixed messages about ageing. We’re told to worship at the fountain of youth, to do everything we can to our bodies and our minds to stay young, yet then we bandy around pejoratives like “grow up” or “act your age”, even that we’re “mutton dressed as lamb”. I feel I’m still at an age where I can dance till dawn but also be able to dole out some wisdom to my fellow revellers! Wisdom is just being able to recognize the repeating patterns that emerge as you get older, and maybe deciding to react to them differently. It’s just the same show with different costumes.’
In Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age, he covers all the bases: sex, death and bacchanalia, with a set list as eclectic as the man himself.
The show played at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane on the 15th and 16th January and will go on to play at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall on Thursday 18th January before Glasgow’s SEC Armadillo on Saturday 20th January.
Photography below by Danny Kaan.