Marketing is the new real. For many years, in theatre as elsewhere in society, the most important thing is not creativity, or originality, or integrity, but hype. A good example is The Years, Eline Arbo’s stage adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s bestselling book. Following well attended runs at the Almeida Theatre and Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, the play is now in the West End. But the one thing that leads publicity about it is not Ernaux’s literary awards, nor the theatrical inventiveness of the production, but the fact that people in the audience faint during the performance.
According to the hype, the scene in which a backstreet abortion is graphically described, although not actually shown, has caused audience members, mostly men, to faint at every single performance, both at the Almeida and at the Harold Pinter Theatre. This is good news for a strictly feminist view of the world: men, who are responsible for the patriarchy, can’t take even the verbal description of the bad stuff they inflict on women. Women, who suffer these horrors, are stronger. No wonder we need trigger warnings. Okay, this is a powerful gesture, a really strong message, but is it actually true? I’m sceptical: while it is perfectly possible that some audience members have been ill, is it really statistically likely that someone faints at every single show?
Overheated publicity apart, the play, which runs for two hours without a break (except for pauses when someone faints), is a well-balanced account of one Frenchwoman’s life which begins just before the Second World War and goes right into the 21st century. Like the book, which mixes the personal and the public, this is also a history of society and social attitudes in an era of remarkable change. The epic quality of the project is achieved by having five actors play the protagonist Annie, each one showing a different side to her growing personality. From young to mature they are Harmony Rose-Bremner, Anjli Mohindra, Romola Garai, Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay.
The women are on stage for the whole time, dressed in black-and-white outfits, and play not only the central character who, as in the original book, usually refers to themselves as “we” rather than “I”, but also their family, friends and lovers. With a mixture of comedy and seriousness, the story moves from wartime air raids, liberation, the Algerian conflict, Vietnam, 1968, feminism, counterculture, consumer society, Bosnia, immigration, 9/11, the rise of the far right and the arrival of the digital world. This historical span cradles the more intimate details of women’s experiences — attraction to boys, loss of virginity, abortion, marriage, contraception, childbirth, lovers, as well as housework and career, and the ambition to write. Although this is all done smoothly and sometimes beautifully, the linear narrative does become a bit tedious in the last 30 minutes.
But the main problem with Arbo’s adaptation, translated by Stephanie Bain, is the rather banal quality of the text, which is clear but usually unsurprisingly in its casual thoughts about time, memory and history. Nothing is said about love which is original, or striking. Nothing is said about the emotional sense of time passing that is memorable; and memory, well likewise — nothing about conflicting remembering within family disagreements. In this version, The Years is memory-lite, time-lite and history-lite. Yes, the 20th century is embodied in Annie, but somehow only in the slightest, most palatable, way.
That said, Arbo’s staging has many delightful moments. There is something captivating about the Brechtian bareness of the stage, and the simple props of chairs and sheets, which focuses our attention on actors at the top of their game. I love the intermittent parade of family photographs, which are smartly and amusingly embodied by the cast, and at one moment the famous film shots of May 1968 students being showered with leaflets is enacted. The music — from Joe Dassin to Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd — works wonderfully as an evocation of the past.
And the cast is great: Mohindra performs a scene of compulsive juvenile masturbation with enormous, and hilarious, brio, the comedy enhanced by some vivid shadow play; by contrast, her character’s loss of virginity is painful, awkwardly joyless, and raises inevitable questions about consent. Garai talks us through the abortion scene with pointed calmness, while McKee gives a lighthearted account of obsessive desire, a chair becoming her lover. Mature sex with younger men is beautifully described by Findlay, and throughout Rose-Bremner leads the singing. And all the women perform a satirical Jane Fonda aerobics workout.
Despite the fun, and there is a lot of entertainment here, some people may think that the focus on the female body is a bit reductive. The stage picture features sheet stained with bright red paint, and the idea that women can be summed up by images of blood, semen and tears is both clichéd and oddly traditional. The psychological and intellectual side of Annie’s journey through the decades really is underplayed, although there are a couple of good jokes about Simone de Beauvoir. Instead, it is the punishment of women’s bodies that gets foregrounded.
Clearly this is most evident in the abortion scene, whose details are harrowing. Watching it, you have wonder about the politics of the episode: on the one hand, showing the horrors of backstreet terminations does encourage all of us to value the laws that protect a woman’s right to choose in Europe, even as these rights are being withdrawn in the US. On the other hand, doesn’t the graphic depiction of horrible incidents such as these unconsciously project the idea that abortion, in any situation, medical or not, must always be traumatic? Surely this was not Ernaux’s intention.
The Years has some, often rather obvious, things to say about the family as the site of habitual shared experience, about how memories layer up over the decades, and about how the personal, a stubbed toe for example, is more deeply felt than world affairs. The serenity that Annie arrives at after some 60 or 70 years of consumerism, from washing machines via record players to Walkmans and computers, feels — in this version at least — like an example of provincial petit-bourgeois complacency. Like the women in Three Sisters, she longs for the metropolis, for Paris, but it takes time for her to get there.
Arbo directs this show with considerable theatrical flair, aided by Juul Dekker’s design, which gives plenty of stage space not only to a table, which serves as the site of almost everything, but also to large white sheets, two of which are daubed with the words “Whore” and “Choice”, plus another one that is spattered with blood. Once again, the feeling is that woman equals body. So although the cast is faultless, my doubts remain: isn’t it about time to show a woman’s life journey as an equal balance between body and mind, family and career, the physical and the intellectual?
- The Years is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 19 April.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Aleks Sierz.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
