An all-star female cast saves the day

Theatre

The Years

Almeida Theatre, London N1

★★★☆☆

Norwegian director Eline Arbo originally adapted Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s critically acclaimed book The Years for Het Nationale Theater in the Hague in 2022. Now, she’s brought an English-language version to the Almeida. Ernaux’s 2008 book is best described as an interlacing of autobiography and social anthropology, folding one woman’s personal history into a collective and existential memory. So it seems like a tricky choice of text to put on stage.

Arbo’s is an ambitious take on Ernaux’s book. She leans into its themes of female emancipation and the circular nature of history and memory, but her reverence for her source material hampers its execution on stage; she doesn’t quite manage to slough off its limitations, which prevents the play from becoming a truly adventurous take on Ernaux’s work.

In this production, the acting saves the day. Seasoned actresses Romola Garai, Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay excel in extracting the drama’s emotional heft and they work in tandem with newcomers Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner, whose rendition of Pink Floyd’s The Great

Gig in the Sky is a highlight. The five actresses portray Ernaux at different stages of her life, dressed in variations of monochrome and backlit like a prism of femininity arriving on stage simultaneously. They remain together on Juul Dekker’s circular set, enacting the interconnectedness of time and collective memory for the entirety of the play’s two-hour duration.

Structured as a trajectory through Ernaux’s life covering the years 1941 to 2006, the narrative is punctuated by tableau recreations of photographs against crisp white sheets, later repurposed as banners and babies, defining which age Ernaux is being depicted at.

We first meet child Annie in

Paris at the end of the Second World War. This is followed by the comedic candour of her teenage sexual awakening, discovering masturbation and the painful realities of sex with men. Later it’s the freedom of the contraceptive pill, political activism, the loss of youth and seduction of younger men. However, it’s the graphically bloody self-administered abortion scenes in which Ernaux describes the foetus as a “baby doll on an umbilical cord” that has reportedly had men fainting in their seats.

The performances are inert initially, no doubt as a function of reciting chunks of Ernaux’s no-frills text which doesn’t lend itself to theatrical embodiment. It takes a while, but when the acting becomes more playful, that’s when the play finds its poetic stride.

Until Aug 31; almeida.co.uk

Ambitious: five actresses play author Annie Ernaux between the years 1941 and 2006