A Woman's Visceral Span
“Life and death in the same breath”
Les Années was written in French by Annie Ernaux, produced as a stage play in Dutch as De jaaren by Eline Arbo and translated into English. Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. The publicity the Almeida production has received has concentrated on a triggering scene which has affected members of the audience. This trigger is the after effects of an illegal abortion which is shown graphically with blood rolling down the thighs of Romola Garai as her foetus is aborted.
This play follows the experience of a French woman described as “we” due to the universality of her experience representing maybe European woman. She is played by five actors at each stage of her life. Each stage is delineated by a photograph, often in black and white at each period of her life, the backdrop a white table cloth which then has the era written on it and is hung up on a washing line.
Annie Ernaux’s era is essentially the same as mine except that I did not experience wartime. But we are very different. I was adopted as a baby at six weeks old and may have been aborted in a time more conducive to a woman’s right to choose. I have never had to have an abortion myself so maybe the termination scene is less shocking to me than to those with personal experience.
The earliest and youngest Annie is played by Anji Mohindra. Born in 1940 she can remember the Allied Forces bombing Normandy where Ernaux lived. There is a problem though as the V2s were German flying rockets not used until 1944 and not against German occupied France in 1942. However despite her convent education she does discover masturbation which is played out for us ultimately in shadow behind a white curtain like the sex scenes in Rocky Horror, but culminates in humping a table.
Each scene of feminine development is accompanied by some world inventions like one of those almanacs which tells us when the toaster was invented or colour television. In the 1950s they secretly read Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and dance to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”. In the late 50s at a summer camp she discovers sex with H the head instructor which she, in the form of Harmony Rose-Bremner, describes as “freedom and men’s bodies” .
Romola Garai takes over to forge her writing ambition. She would like to write about politics but the thought that she is pregnant dominates her thoughts. After the abortion comes marriage, the birth of children, Viet Nam, the 1968 Student Revolts and the Beatles. She is lucky. Not left infertile by the abortion. 1970 brings the New Age post the Hippies and yoga.
We see her as a mother and career woman with children, her two boys throwing food at each other while she tries to clean up. She is in her 40s in the 80s. There is divorce and new sexual encounters sometimes, with the male female power balance reversed. In 1992 there is the beautiful, ethereal Gina McKee in the ballet of waiting for her new lover. The menopause hardly gets a mention. Her sixteen year old cat dies in 2008 and she feels she has lost her sense of the future, now played by Deborah Findlay, as in reality her literary fame takes off.
The Years is beautifully expressed and acted but the content did not thrill me as much as the anticipation of seeing this cast together.
Editor of TheatreVibe.co.uk
See ABOUT US
The Years
Directed by Eline Arbo
Cast
Starring:
Gina McKee
Anjli Mohindra
Deborah Findlay
Romola Garai
Harmony Rose-Bremner
Creatives
Director: Eline Arbo
Set Designer: Juul Dekker
Costume Designer: Rebecca Wörmann
Musical Supervisor
and Sound Designer: Thijs van Vuure
Lighting Designer: Varja Klosse
Translators: Tanya Leslie, Alison L Strayer
Intimacy Director: Yarit Dor
Information
Running Time: One hour 55 minutes without an interval. May be longer if member of audience taken unwell.
Booking until 8th September 2024
Theatre:
Almeida Theatre
Almeida Street
London N1 1TA
Phone: 020 7359 4404
Website: almeida.co.uk
Tube: The Angel
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge
at the Almeida
at the evening performance
on 8th August 2024
