Sheets. Sheets and a table are nearly all that five remarkable actresses need to tell the story of a woman’s life over more than sixty years, from 1940 to the early 2000s.
The Years is an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir Les Années, a memoir that is both personal and collective. While recounting details of her own life, she intersperses these personal memories with details of the social and cultural life around her, telling a collective history of women over her lifetime, one woman standing in for all of us. Ernaux herself describes the book as “a slippery narrative,” one that is “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.”
It’s not obvious how such a work can work on stage. The first brilliant stroke of the adaptor, Eline Arbo, is to hand this “slippery narrative” over to an ensemble of five women, aged 25 to 77, who will each hand the story off to the next older woman as we progress through time.
Ernaux’s book is structured around photographs of herself, as she meticulously describes the persona Annie is trying to present—and the one she is unconsciously presenting. The play uses this device as well, with two women holding up a sheet while the actor currently playing Annie poses in front of it, changing her stance and expression to fit the photo’s description. If the photo says she is holding a baby, she will pull down the sheet and shape it into a baby she cuddles.
Each sheet then covers the central table, where much of the action takes place, as the four women not currently playing Annie take on the roles of family members, friends, lovers. The sheets acquire wine stains from a family dinner, the mess from toddlers throwing food at each other and, most dramatically, blood from an illegal abortion.
The abortion is harrowing, not so much for what we see—though there is plenty of blood—as for Romola Garai’s unsparing account of her experience, from the dread of her missed period to the pain and terror of visiting an abortionist in Paris to the expulsion of the fetus in her college dorm. It’s a heart-wrenching and uncompromising enactment of a woman’s experience of life and death.
A shaking Garai leaves the table following her near-fatal abortion. Two of the others bring out a bucket and cloths and tenderly wash her bloodied legs and hands, while she stands downstage center, still rigid with the shock of her experience. This gentle bathing is a gesture that seems to extend to us, a traumatized audience, reassuring us that we can breathe once more.
Sexual desire is a constant in Annie’s life: funny, dark, sometimes both. Anjli Mohindra’s exploration of her body when she discovers masturbation is delightful, while her deflowering at the hands of an older camp counselor is unnerving. Gina McKee as a post-menopausal Annie takes a younger lover, and she is both devastated by her need and energized by playfully toying with him. (He is represented on stage by a chair she casually twirls on one leg.) Sexual and literary passion unite when the oldest Annie, Deborah Findlay, shouts out her ideas for a book as she enthusiastically humps her latest lover.
Aging and joy, peaceful acceptance of one’s life in all its pleasure and pain begin to replace the drama of earlier years. As the play comes to a quiet close, Deborah Findlay’s Annie looks back on her life, which she is now forming into the book that we have been experiencing in real time. There’s no dramatic climax, just a life that nears its end and embraces all that has come before.
And finally, all the used sheets (what woman doesn’t have experience with cleaning sheets?) are hung from the flies like battered reminders of this woman’s life. All five actresses gather upstage, embracing before a live camera, which feeds their luminous faces onto the sheets that float delicately across the stage.
You have beautifully caught the emotional power of this play–and the fabulous cast and staging.