The Years review: This Annie Ernaux adaptation is a unique, profoundly moving experience

A stage version of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s masterpiece, in which five women play the author throughout her life, manages the extraordinary feat of intricately telling the story of a whole life in less than two hours

The cast of ‘The Years' (Ali Wright)

There’s a scene in The Years, Eline Arbo’s adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s masterpiece memoir, when a version of the author (played by Romola Garai) is describing the book she one day dreams of writing. “It’s about people and memories and time,” she explains, laying out the central themes of not just The Years, but of Ernaux’s oeuvre. At every age and stage, personal and world events have enriched Ernaux’s life and work, which is both fiction and biography, micro and macro in its scope.

The book, published in 2008, can be considered the fundamental Ernaux text, a perfect introduction to the French author who won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 82. In this production, originally adapted and directed by Arbo for the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, she is cleaved into five separate past Annies, played through the generations by Harmony Rose-Bremner, Anjli Mohindra, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Deborah Findlay respectively. Between them, a tapestry of history is weaved, constructing the full, extraordinary image of a life that is, in many ways, totally ordinary. The play captures these contradictions, finding laughter in tragedy and devastating detail in mundanity. It moved me in ways theatre often tries to but rarely achieves.

When the five women arrive on the stage, darkly lit against Juul Dekker’s stripped-back set, they are dressed in different monochromatic outfits and speak in their own accents. Nothing suggests they make up a cohesive whole, bar the collective “we” with which they speak – never “I”, although occasionally “she”. When it’s not their turn to play at being Annie, the other actors embody her parents and her lovers, and build sets and soundscapes, with the pure-voiced Rose-Bremner often leading them in song.

The experience is akin to flicking through a scrapbook in chronological order. New eras are marked by a tableau recreation of a photograph, the Annie of the day positioning herself against a crisp white sheet. Afterwards, those sheets are repurposed as tablecloths and banners and babies, splattered with food and slurs and bodily fluids, and hung up on a line against the Almeida’s bare brick walls. Annie’s life barrels forward, yet the past is always there, reminding her, and us, where she’s been.

Despite their physical differences, the actors thread a shared line through their portrayals of Annie. Desire is valued at every age, with words like “ooze” and “penetrate” filling everyday language. Sex scenes are raw, dark, hilarious; often all three. One minute Mohindra, as the teenage Annie, is a masterful physical comedian discovering masturbation, the next, she is pained and disturbed as Annie loses her virginity. Somehow, there are comic beats in the latter scene too. They don’t dull the pain but show a complexity of experience and memory.

If there is a moment that is particularly challenging, it is the act-three abortion scene, performed by Garai. It’s been reported that, during one preview, the cast had to pause for 10 minutes due to audiences feeling faint. The show comes with a trigger warning, but this moment shouldn’t be reduced to pure body horror. There is blood (lots of it) and screaming, the tension comes before: the missed period, the walk up the stairs to the makeshift clinic, the strange banality of a melba toast wrapper in the process. Afterwards, life simply continues. Soon, the contraceptive pill is made legal. “We could be so free in our bodies, it was frightening,” McKee says.

At every stage, Arbo situates The Years within its historical context, as the other Annies remind us of the technological advances and world events accompanying her life. The rise of capitalism and the free market, the invention of the internet, breed a more individualist time where “a new age of memory” is born. With events in France (the end of the Algerian war) and on the world stage (9/11) themes are raised such as the rise of the right and immigration which feel depressingly prescient, particularly when Putin and Le Pen (the elder) are discussed. It jolts audiences back into the present day, reminding us that both everything and nothing has changed since the 20th century.

Romola Garai in ‘The Years' (Ali Wright)

Clocking in at nearly two hours without an interval, The Years could drag, yet Arbo’s production is expertly paced and taut. By the time Annie enters her final act, played by Findlay, those big dramatic moments are less frequent. What remains is just a life continuing, and yet no less profound than those loud central setpieces. Tears pool in my eyes; in my notebook, I scribble down: “Why am I crying?” The question, like Ernaux’s work, doesn’t have an easy answer. Ultimately, it is the emotional experience of seeing an entire existence lived on stage; a fairly unremarkable life made utterly remarkable.

Almeida Theatre, until 31 August; almeida.co.uk