First mounted at the Almeida in 2024, The Years is Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical work Les Années (2008), as adapted by Norwegian director Eline Arbo (using a translation by Stephanie Bain). Ernaux’s memoir charts a woman’s lifein post-war France in an extraordinarily profound yet playful drama, suggesting the nexus between a particular woman’s journey from youth to old age and the arc of history – an intertwining of the personal and the political – through what the author describes as a collective consciousness. Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of Arbo’s superb adaptation is that it projects this idea through, aptly, one of the most truly collaborative performances London has seen in years.
The woman (‘Annie’) is played here by five superb actors – Harmony Rose-Bremner, Anjli Mohindra, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, and Deborah Findlay – passing the baton by marking various phases of Annie’s life from childhood to old age, reminding us that a single life is multifaceted. Annie is born during the second world war, like Ernaux, living through postwar penury, the nimiety and flux of the swinging 60s, conflict with Algeria, bohemianism, 1980s juggling of marriage, motherhood and work, and on. The actors also assume the roles of the woman’s family, friends and lovers throughout the different phases of her life. The fluidity and camaraderie of the tight-knit ensemble is remarkable to behold.
Juul Dekker’s stage design is minimalistic but compelling, with a powerful symbolism. The principle prop is a long table, which will host family gatherings through generations, and whose white tablecloth serves as a motif – doubling as a backdrop for the studio photographs taken of Annie at various points in her development, and also being whipped off and strung from washing-lines to denote blood-steeped pain, parenthood, or protest. Cloths are also used to display two diametrically opposed slogans that appear during the performance: ‘whore’ and ‘choice’.
Music adds textural dimension to proceedings; throughout the play the cast sing, both in English and French, dance, and play musical instruments. The soundtrack is intensely evocative, especially of 1980s France–Jean Ferrat’s nostalgic Ma France and Desireless’s Voyage transport the audience across the Channel. Rose-Bremner (child Annie) has a highly musical presence, one highlight being her leading the other members of the cast in a Jane Fonda-style aerobic workout, while singing Taylor Dane’s Tell it to My Heart.
Whilst Annie’s life is full of hardship, compromise and insipidity, there is a pervasive undercurrent of cheerfulness and humour. Sexual expression and fulfilment are abiding themes, and it is refreshing to see this enacted so unconstrainedly on stage. The young woman’s raging hormones are depicted as comically compulsive in masturbation scenes by Mohindra, who also portrays the loss of virginity as she is raped by a teacher with masterful unease, conveying the confusion, discomfort, and loneliness of the experience. Young male lovers in older age are shown in lascivious scenes between Findlay and Mohindra, while the overwhelming obsessive love that Ernaux has written about is made deliciously coy and raunchy by McKee (as middle-aged, divorced Annie), and Garai as her new lover, simulating sex on an office chair, so that it seems to belightly satirised. None of these scenes are laden with value judgement; rather they’re presented prosaically, allowing for the actions and the emotions to speak for themselves.
Annie is in perpetual dialogue with herself – never as in the first person singular ‘I’, but plural ‘we’ – in a way that is both introspective and emblematic of the changing world around her. There is an interweaving of political, consumer, and societal shifts in the world at large (Vietnam, the 1968 student revolt, bourgeois materialism, the end of the Cold War) with events in her own life. The personal and political become enmeshed in a scene involving Annie’s unwanted pregnancy and subsequent backstreet abortion in the 1960s. Garai powerfully relays harrowing distress in a deeply moving scene that starkly represents the plight of generations of women before the liberation afforded by the contraceptive pill and rise of feminism. It’s a disturbing and arresting sequence, which had to be paused on press night as theatre staff attended to some audience members distressed by what they had seen. Its potency is such that is has caused viewers to faint (there are trigger warnings on the play’s website and at the theatre). Garai showed commendable professionalism and poise in picking up where she had left off after a ten-minute interlude whilst the lights came up and the actors stood in solidarity in the shadows at the back of the stage. In the aftermath of the grisly procedure, the four women share the task of wiping the blood from Garai's hands and body, in an expression of sisterhood that symbolically expurgates the indignity, agony, and unfairness of what has just transpired.
Even though there is an underlying current of seriousness, the play is punctuated with humour, which makes most of it a real delight to watch. The collective portrayal of Annie is unfailingly persuasive, and it is obvious that the cast have great fun playing across gender and age. Typical of the time-defying ethos is one of the tableaux in which Garai plays Annie, depicting the trials and tribulations of maternity. McKee and Findlay play Annie’s boisterous, brattish boys with evident relish – typical of thtime-defying ethos.
There is such emotional depth, exquisite mystery, and theatrical virtuosity here that it holds the audience enthralled across the ages. The spell-binding feat of story-telling, consummate choreography and exceptional ensemble acting in this production makes it nothing short of a masterpiece.
The Years *****
Until 19 April at Harold Pinter Theatre, Panton Street, London, SW1Y 4DN
Harmony Rose-Bremner, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, and Deborah Findlay.
Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Deborah Findlay, Harmony Rose-Bremner, and Anjli Mohindra.
