The Years at Almeida Theatre

“The world began in 1968!” Gina McKee screams giddily midway through The Years, Eline Arbo’s joyous, heartfelt adaptation of what might be Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s masterpiece. Ernaux (played by McKee in middle age, and her four castmates at varying stages) is not just ushering in a new era, she’s crying out for her own adolescence, her freedom and women’s liberation. The line, like the best of this play, shows how history can collapse in the space of a sentence, and how we claim our testimony as proof of our own significance. 

The Years starts and ends on two of the year’s most vividly orchestrated tableaux – one simple, one complex, both shudderingly brilliant. Arbo, who has taken over from Ivo van Hove as director at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, first staged The Years for a Dutch crowd. The universality of the feminine experience means this translates fluently to the London stage. Ernaux’s text conflates half a century of world politics with her autobiography. The scale of Ernaux’s wonder has made her the voice of a generation. The play conveys the force of Ernaux’s marvel, mining all the pathos from the profound and the mundane, rubbing together day by day. 

The five actors loop around the Almeida stage like a reel through a camera, or perhaps like history around the flat circle, each playing Ernaux for a decade or so at a time. As a group monologue, The Years is a sensationally bold project. Ingeniously adapted by Stephanie Bain, she achieves the unachievable – translating Ernaux’s fragmented journal, in which the word “I” never appears, and which is told exclusively in the present tense, into theatrical stardust. 

How to stage the life, of life’s greatest, Nobel-winning chronicler? The play arrives freighted with expectation, fanfare and controversy, including reports of men fainting midway through the previews. The scene responsible, a chilling précis of Ernaux’s backstreet abortion (played, in her youth, by Romola Garai, sensational), is unbelievably grim – the theatre seemed suspended in mid-air until it was over. Each actor (Ernaux is also played by Deborah Findlay, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner) plays the multitudes of Ernaux’s 80 years in slippery ways, like the slippery narrative of her own text. 

All of life is, literally, in it. All the apocryphal wisdom of the 60s (like ads for chlorophyll toothpaste and  “women can only orgasm once they’ve had children”), all the snapshots of history that shape our vision of the world (“Yeltsin on his tank”, “Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress with Bill Clinton’s semen on it”), all the pain (not least forced jollity of our 20s, which for Ernaux seem to elide so much loss with it), all the wanting (her fierce passion for men, a Russian diplomat and a younger lover), all the home truths (“Coming to feel like a tribal elder”). Played straight through in 120 minutes, each is deftly explored in this dazzling show. 

Ernaux is now 82, her ears still so finely attuned to the world that to lose them will feel like some of its secrets will be lost for good. The staging has a glimmering power, a wink to it that acknowledges its smoke-like quality, one that flickers with vivid, astonishing joy, then is just as quickly gone.

Jonathan Mahon-Heap
Photos: Ali Wright

The Years is at Almeida Theatre from 27^th July until 31^st August 2024. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.

Watch the trailer for The Years at Almeida Theatre here: