Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Annie Ernaux is a writer who tells it how it is with outspoken, unabashed directness, and this is equally true of this staging, adapted and directed by Eline Arbo based on Les Années, a book that blends fictionalised autobiography with shared female experience in recounting life over seven decades from 1940 through to 2006.
Five actresses, on stage throughout for nearly two hours without interval, play Annie at different stages in her life and also narrate, comment and play all the other characters including the men who are part of her story.
A wartime baby, little Annie, played by Harmony Rose-Bremner, grows up in provincial Normandy and goes to convent school. Reaching puberty, when Anjli Mohindra takes over, she discovers the joys of masturbation. There is an hilarious sequence as it becomes an obsession, but things aren’t so funny when she has her first disappointing experience of sex with a man.
As a student, Annie finds herself pregnant and, after a botched knitting needle attempt at termination, travels to Paris to seek an abortion. At previews, the realism of its presentation reportedly resulted in grown men fainting. It is indeed presented in gory detail, but it is the mixture of panic and stoicism of Romola Garai’s performance that holds the audience stock still and totally silent until it is over.
Gina McKee is the older Annie, wife and mother, eventually left with an empty nest except for her cat, but still with a keen sex drive (McKee is delightful in a scene where a chair stands in for her lover), and Deborah Findlay is the grandmother who can look back over seven decades in what is not just one woman’s story but an overview of the many changes in our society: attitudes, relationships, laws, technology—all so far-reaching, from the pill to the Internet, 1968 Eventments to 9/11. It is a woman’s view of world history.
It is presented on a largely bare stage with a circular track along which necessary props are conveyed and the cast sometimes process. Much of the time, there is a table which also serves as a bed. Its tablecloth is whipped off to become the backcloth for a series of posed snapshots which, as in the book, spark particular times and particular memories. Its bedsheets are stained with blood and semen and can be turned into banners that claim women’s rights.
A thread runs though the play of the need to write the book, which here gains fruition, but its voice is plural: not I but we, it speaks for all women—and not just women. This is a play from a book built on memories. Older people will have theirs stirred and be reminded of just how much they have witnessed and lived through, youngsters who don’t usually look backwards made aware of what has led to the advantages they have and the dangers they inherit: there is a lively scene in which tech-savvy sons are bemused by the lack of know-how of Deborah Findlay’s Annie and she bemoans their ignorance of the past.
The Year looks backs without a trace of sentimental nostalgia, and its honest performances and raw presentation make it gripping as well as funny and moving. There has been a plethora of video overused in recent theatre productions. Director Eline Arbo uses just a single live video shot as her finale that is typical of the economy and good judgement of the whole production. It makes a celebration of womanhood and of its five excellent actors.