Ruth Leon Pocket Theatre Review: The Years – Harold Pinter Theatre

The Years

It’s only February but this, for me, is already the play of the year. The Years is about us and our time, but only if you are a woman who has lived through the 20th/21st century from 1940 to 2025.  If you are, you will recognise every era, every mood, every societal change, every political idea, every personal female preoccupation.

Annie Ernaux, the only French woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, writes about herself but this is no ordinary autobiograhy. She traces the life of a woman through the life of her century (Ernaux is now 82) and Eline Arbo, her brilliant adapter/director, has chosen to tell her stories with five actors of different ages and ethnicities, as she ages from child to young woman, to wife, to mother, to vibrant old age.

As with every life, there are ups and downs, humour and tragedy. I laughed out loud many times (rare for me) but also suffered through the tough stuff such as the tabletop abortion played out graphically with anguish and blood. This is only one of many scenes in the life of a woman of our times. Marriage is just a passing phase. Motherhood too, comes and goes as her much-loved but little-understood sons grow up and move on. Divorce, sexual obsession, other phases of her life take place against the background of the social and political movements of the century and they, too, pass.

The Years is punctuated with music and song which is useful to give period context to the action but is otherwise undistinguished. Each episode is ‘illustrated’ with a snapshot, acted out against a white sheet.

I said that this is the play of the year but I say that without being sure whether this is a play or not. There is no dialogue, the actors never address each other and the words they speak are a five-headed disjointed narrative. The life and the century are the plot.
But these five fine actors – Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjili Mohindra and Harmoney Rose-Bremner – each so different, embody Annie Ernaux’s life and times with such clarity that, sometimes, they seem to be one person on a single journey. Which, of course, is the intention.

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