What is living if not a sort of time travel? Annie Ernaux’s Booker-nominated book ‘Les Années’ is an artful autobiography that traces her journey from childhood in postwar France to old age in the post-9/11 era.
Elegantly adapted by Eline Arbo – the new boss of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, aka Ivo van Hove’s replacement – English-language stage version ‘The Years’ is a 60-odd year journey through France, the West, women’s liberation and more.
But what I really took from it was Ernaux’s vivid wonderment at the fact she existed at all these points in history – life as time travel.
In the book this is enabled by the use of the third person, with Ernaux almost offering a historical study of herself, rather than fulfilling the role of a narrator who exists mostly in the present peering back into her past. It’s as much a story about the times she lived through as her speciifc experience.
Arbo’s adaptation retains this and bucks cliches about ‘memoir plays’ by having the story’s protagonist diffused into a five-strong collective of black and white-clad women. Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner embody Ernaux throughout her life, with a loose correlation between the age of the actor leading a given scene and Ernaux’s age at the time.
It is a superb ensemble – the performers are charismatic, fierce, playful and it feels like their personalities are being intermingled with that of Ernaux. There’s a sense that the story shared in this room belongs to them and Arbo as much as to the original author – a feeling of universality and sisterhood bubbles under the surface. There is a section at the start that talks of a person’s experiences being lost when they die - but also how they can live on through others. That’s what ‘The Years’ feels like, an act of dissemination as much as storytelling.
The production has attracted a bit of controversy after a few audience members fainted at an early performance during a scene where a younger Ernaux has an abortion. It’s the show’s most gruelling moment but it would be a shame if it gave ‘The Years’ a reputation for being wilfully challenging. In fact it’s a playful couple of hours, fluidly directed by Albo. There are harrowing moments but it’s also full of humour and humorous interplay. In an early scene an adolescent Ernaux (played by Mohindra) discovers the joys of wanking; the other actors form an awkward protective barrier around her as she gets to noisy work on herself, a flustered McKee trying to continue the story.
Sex feels hugely important here because it’s the thing that keeps Ernaux tethered to each time. As she moves into middle and old age she has appetites that feel timeless. She inevitably becomes befuddled by aspects of the times she lives through – her grown-up children banging on about Pirate Bay in the ‘00s – but her libido feels like a constant throughout.
In ‘The Years’ none of what we’re seeing is really ‘the past’, ‘the future’ or ‘now’; it’s a human life, which includes all these events equally. Arbo’s production is not technically flashy, but a final scene in which the actors freeze into a tableau of photos of Ernaux from across her life is intensely moving, everything everywhere all at once.