The Years: an audacious adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s masterpiece of memoir and sociology

A life in five parts in a changing France is wrought powerfully on stage in this adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s book The Years

Eline Arbo’s production of The Years at London’s Almeida Theatre is a rare triumph. First adapted into Dutch and premiered in Amsterdam in 2022, the play breathes theatrical life into the Nobel-winning writer Annie Ernaux’s masterpiece of the same name, delineating a composite portrait of a woman and a culture over seven decades. This audacious translation to the stage of a complex work of literature represents a considerable feat of dramaturgical vision and sensitivity.

The Years, first published in 2008, is not an obvious candidate for theatrical adaptation. A unique blend of memoir and sociology, the book retraces the stages of Ernaux’s life, embedding personal experiences within the larger context of French history.

The book features no dialogue, and unfolds predominantly in brisk declarative sentences. Moreover, it is dense with references to the cultural and social minutiae of 20th- and early 21st-century France, as it catalogues the nation’s favourite foods, clothes, films, labour-saving devices and public intellectuals.

Though the book’s narrative arc follows the events of Ernaux’s life, the autobiographical plotline does not generate the confessional intimacy which many memoirs seek to cultivate. Instead, the prose aspires to objectivity.

This commitment to unsentimental directness is reflected in Ernaux’s choice to write about herself primarily in the third person (“she is the woman in the picture”) or through the use of a collective first-person plural (“we felt as if we had outsmarted time”). This consistent intermingling of the personal and impersonal lends political and universal significance to private experiences.

Through this nesting of the individual within the collective, a traumatic illegal abortion, an early marriage, a divorce and a move to a new town on the outskirts of Paris register as signs of the times, rather than singular occurrences arising from the idiosyncrasies of a particular personality.

Arbo’s adaptation of The Years is not constrained by absolute fidelity to the original. Her most radical departures from her source text are key to the production’s power.

In one of her most inspired directorial choices, Ernaux is represented not by one “Annie” but many – her appearances at different stages of life brilliantly rendered by Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner.

Not only does a new Annie come to the fore every few minutes, but each of the actors also regularly breaks character to assume the roles of narrator, friend, lover, parent or son. Such kaleidoscopic reformations present an initial challenge to an audience’s expectations of narrative and psychological continuity – but the decision to disseminate Annie among different faces, ages and voices gives striking physical embodiment to Ernaux’s literary musings about the multiplicity and fluidity of the self in time.

The set also plays a major part in The Years’ success. A minimalist, circular stage, subtly evocative of a clock, effectively enhances the audience’s sense of the march of time. Myriad stylishly realised rotations reconfigure the central space, imparting a sense both of progress and cyclicality to the play’s journey through the decades.

The effect of this artful dynamic geometry is to magnify the audience’s awareness of the novelty and sameness that make up human existence. Things change for Annie over the course of the play, and the society in which she evolves changes too – yet these changes constitute a kind of repetition. The little girl born in 1940 grows into a young woman full of dreams for the future; the young woman becomes a mother; the mother in turn becomes a grandmother with a diminishing sense of the future.

In the same period, corner shops are replaced by supermarkets and hypermarkets; the record player is superseded by the transistor radio, the Walkman, the CD player and the iPod; elections give way to other elections; wars to other wars.

The sheer variety of scenes in this fast-moving chronological carousel makes for great tonal range. The visceral depiction of a dangerous backstreet abortion in the early 1960s gives way to the excitement of May 1968 in Paris. The thrill of protest peters into its anticlimactic aftermath. The happiness of family life descends into divorce. Thoughts about lovers and ageing cede the limelight to the pounding energy of a 1980s keep-fit class (rendered with joyous comic vigour by the full troupe of Annies).

At the centre of the stage in most of the play’s scenes sits a table or bed – props which come to stand for decades of family dinners and sexual encounters (the latter depicted with Ernaux-worthy frankness). Tablecloths and bedsheets are repurposed as political placards or comically scrunched up to represent babies or cats. They are also regularly hauled up to serve as photographic backdrops. Like Ernaux’s book, in which the description of photographs functions as a leitmotif, the play gains rhythmical momentum from the repetition of this commemorative gesture.

As well as a structural device, the taking of photographs is, in both works, an act laden with the anticipation of loss. As Ernaux’s allusions to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time indicate, The Years is in large part about memory and forgetting. It is, in the book’s concluding words, an attempt “to save something from the time where we will never be again”.

Arbo’s adaptation is attuned to this existential dimension of the text. As the play unfolds, the tablecloths, bedsheets, photographic backdrops and political placards are hung up at the back of the stage – like dirty laundry or developing photographs. Side by side, they form a wine-, blood- and ink-stained biographical tapestry.

In the play’s final moments, these sheets are rigged up to a tall mast, around which they begin to turn, like the hands of a clock or pages of a book. Upon these slowly whirling pages are projected large moving images of Annie at different ages. This makeshift but somehow majestic display of the archive of a life is poignant without being sentimental, displaying what can be saved as present turns to past, but also conjuring all that cannot.

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Scarlett Baron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.