The Years – Harold Pinter Theatre, London

Writer and Director: Eline Arbo

There is a scene in The Years that has already caused some media controversy with tales of people fainting and having to leave the auditorium; indeed, during this Press performance the show was stopped twice to provide front of house support for audience members. Its content is horrifyingly moving and one of the most important things you will see on stage in this or any year because it speaks so graphically to the very substance of The Years, to the pain, external control and physical impact of the twentieth century on women through the politicisation of their bodies. Transferring from the Almeida Theatre to the Harold Pinter Theatre, Eline Arbo’s stage adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir is hugely affecting and deeply, deeply important.

Telling the story of a woman’s life, Ernaux and Arbo tie her growth, her physical and biological development, into the history of the last 80 years; starting with her childhood after the Second World War, through her adolescence in the 1950s and on to her post-millennium autumn years where she is increasingly distanced from time and overtaken by the now baffling lives of her children and grandchildren. What makes this play so impactful is the charting of the socio-cultural, political and technological changes of this lifetime which are drawn through the woman’s experience of her body and the roles she is expected and allowed to play.

This biography is imagined through a series of photographs, memories of the women she was that provide Arbo with a chapter structure and an important throughline from the pudgy child in a bonnet onwards while she ages into the family members she once looked up to, gradually assuming the role of child, parent and grandparent. Each photograph moment – staged by Arbo in front of white tablecloths and continually pulling back to a family dinner table – is a doorway through time, moving out of the snapshot moment and into a crucial anecdote or insight that shapes the women she becomes, she is and she was.

The physicality of this time is marked in her body, not only by having five actors play Annie at different points in time, but by exploring male control of her choices and resultant traumas and expectations she experiences. Those moments are both sadly relatable and sometimes distressing, from her first sexual encounter in the 1950s with a man who cannot be gentle, an abuse of power that she can do nothing but accept, to the backstreet abortion that has been much talked about. Shows will keep being stopped during this 12-week run; it is hard to watch, and it should be, but it is essential that the pain and shame heaped on women is openly discussed as it is here, to see the consequences of social and political choices on the citizens they constrain.

There is joy and passion here too, and as Annie emerges into a freer middle age it coincides with more permissive times, leading to greater sexual satisfaction and a return to the women she wanted to be once the expectations of motherhood and marriage are cast aside. And while occasionally the piece is crass where it could be more subtle, The Years is ultimately a communal and universal story of all women and the stages of life that are lived biologically – puberty, pregnancy, menopause – but also the imposed roles of wife, mother, sister and others that bring a momentum and expectation of their own.

Performed by Gina McKee, Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner each playing the central woman and a variety of supporting roles, this is an exceptional ensemble piece in which the actors create every element of the story themselves – although Garai’s regularly interrupted performance shows considerable poise in resuming the devastating intensity of the moment. In the final scene of the show, as Arbo’s characters hoist aloft the stains and badges of a complex, messy, challenging and fulfilling life, we know this woman has endured it all and earned the right to control her body.

Runs until 19 April 2025