FringeReview UK 2024
The Years
Almeida Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, Contemporary, Drama, European Theatre, Experimental, Feminist Theatre, Historical, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, Translation
Venue: Almeida Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
”Memory pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.” This might sound complex. The production though blazes with such truth it causes an entire audience to rise as one in a standing ovation. First seen in the Netherlands, The Years by Nobel-winning French Annie Ernaux is adapted and directed by Eline Arbo. Translated into English it’s been further adapted by Stephanie Bain in collaboration with Arbo, and runs at the Almeida till August 31st.
This production reminds us it’s often the least theatrical, least tractable works that break boundaries, glow with an authority that changes the order of things.
Writer Annie Ernaux, Adaptor and Director Eline Arbo, English Adaptor Stephanie Bain Translators Tanya Leslie and Alison E Strayer
Music Supervisor and Sound Designer Thijs can Vuure, Set Designer Juul Dekker, Costume Designer Rebekka Wormann, Lighting Designer Varja Klosse, Intimacy Director Yarit Dor
Casting Director Amy Ball CDG, Costume Supervisor Heidi Bryan, Wigs, Hair & Makeup Supervisor Sophia Khan, Vocal Coach Matt Smith, Dialect Coach Fabien Enjalric, Assistant Director Yasmin Hafesji
Production Manager Emily Brown, Production Co-ordinator Emily Brown, CSMs Linda Fitzpatrick, Dan Ayling, DSM Megan Charlton, ASM Jasmine Dittman, Stage Management Placement Ida Robeson
Till August 31st
Review
”Memory pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.” This might sound complex. The production though blazes with such truth it causes an entire audience to rise as one in a standing ovation. First seen in the Netherlands, The Years by Nobel-winning French Annie Ernaux is adapted and directed by Eline Arbo. Translated into English it’s been further adapted by Stephanie Bain in collaboration with Arbo, and runs at the Almeida till August 31st.
The nearest writer readers and recent theatre-goers might compare Ernaux to is Maggie Nelson. Her short Bluets, an autofiction on sex, melancholy and death was adapted for the Royal Court recently. Ernaux, born in 1940, rejects such labels and instead subjects her own life to what the flow of time does with us, and us with it. Taking the trope of the French Roman fleuve literally, Ernaux subverts it. It’s like giving Proust an ice-cold shower.
Always a “we” and not “I”. Ernaux’s decades are inhabited in this production by five women, each multi-roling, each taking on a phase of that life: Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohundra, Harmony Rose-Bremmer.
Starting in rural Normandy, it’s always too far from Paris. Each are framed in a ‘photograph’ against a white sheet, verbally date the top of a scene and evoke decades.
Ernaux’s Annie isn’t quite Ernaux, who published relatively early. Rose-Bremmer somersaults with wit and brio from nine to 15. Hers is a post-war France still with rigours, traumas and yet the bursting optimism of adults around her; keeping words like “lesbian and “miscarriage” from her too. Mohundra from 15-22 proves memorably funny and touching on adolescence, growing political awareness (Algeria) the balletic cringe and celebration of her masturbation scene (nearly all the Annies enact one), and first brutal sexual experience at summer camp.
What Ernaux traces too is the stubborn refusal of men to value women as first sexual beings, then colleagues and equals. This reaches a lonely apex in Garai’s portrayal of sexually liberated but suddenly compromised Annie from 23-39, as Annie finds a back-street abortionist, with resultant details that might be triggering for some. It takes some moments for others to wash down Garai. Each sheet takes on stains, or words like ‘Choice’ and other marks of the decades. Another involves a food-fight.
Garai ranges from visceral to knowingly liberated through a complacent tinge of fashionably married, through 1968 and Les Evenements and feminism to moving to Paris: “I mean 40 kilometres from Paris.” And LSD parties. Ernaux’s critique is class-based too: the working-class girl who becomes a university-educated intellectual, yet unlike her academic husband an overworked schoolteacher.
Garai gets a laugh from Annie 2 (Mohundra) chipping in in “If I haven’t written a novel by the age of twenty-five, I’ll kill myself.” The whole work, but particularly from its mid-point, takes on the different Annies with their own period obsessions chipping in with solutions for an earlier or later Annie; like aerobics (from Annie 4 to Annie 3). It’s enacting on stage advice to a future or earlier self.
Increasingly Annie’s not leaping at the future but imperceptibly favouring the Beatles over the Sex Pistols Annie 3’s two sons play. And their gradual usurpations (taken by two braces of Annies) of technology from videos through MP3s and Macs, start pushing Annie to the side of the future. Not everything goes to plan though: one brother assures the other Macintosh will be finished by 1995.
Some of the funniest moments come as all actors in turn jump gleefully on childish or avuncular roles. Two (Findlay and Mohundra) tussle as one elder (Garai in this case) starts talking about Le Pen having a point; as if they’re leftover survivors from Buñuel’s 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
McKee brings a dash of elegance to the divorcée from 1980-98, taking lovers to an extreme pitch of desire, and a conclusion: “we savoured the ritual that we’d previously dreaded.” Ernaux comes to the unsettling conclusion about her sons that it isn’t genes or blood but shared experiences “a present consisting of thousands of days” that kins people. At the same time the aerobics moment with all five actors isn’t just comedic but an awkward pang of recognition.
Findlay enacts a valedictory unravelling. Not bewildered but bemused by development, yet starting to make a coherence out of the many notes. “He wrenches me away from my generation” she writes of a “boring” young lover. ”But I am not part of his. I’m nowhere in time.”
Juul Dekker’s set strips back as so often at the Almeida, to its brick walls, and the circular stage (not quite a revolve) allows items to get hauled on and off. The sheet’s uses too become symbolically clear, finally enjoy a visual coup. Varja Klosse’s lighting is often glowingly murky, almost sulphurous but atmospheric. Evoking fashion, Rebekka Wormann’s costumes ranging from skirts to trouser suits are exchanged at key moments. Then there’s Thijs van Vuure’s sound, ranging from chansons through Bill Haley to Techno and jumping to jagged sophistication in the Art of Fugue, with Rose-Bremmer humming Pink Floyd.
The final tableau is mesmerising. The sheets hooked up turn like a series of mobiles, faces of the actors grouped behind projected on them, experiences thus stamped on their faces.
Ernaux spares herself and us nothing. Nor do the five performers in stunning performances: by turns blistering, tender and very, very funny. Happily, however visceral the subject matter (one man was led out behind me), this is why theatre matters. After seeing an underwhelming adaption the previous night, this production reminds us it’s often the least theatrical, least tractable works that break boundaries, glow with an authority that changes the order of things.
