The Years at Almeida Theatre

My feelings heading into our August Cog Night trip to Almeida Theatre were a healthy mix of excitement for the show ahead, and anxiety at having volunteered to write the review.

I’ve never reviewed a play before, and my anxieties mostly centred around whether I would remember everything that happened well enough to write about it afterwards. With a running time of nearly two hours and no interval during which to hastily jot down my thoughts in the loo, I worried the scenes would get jumbled in my head.

Fortunately, the play left such a big impression on me that I didn’t need to worry about that at all.

After a slightly sweaty tube journey to Angel, we enjoyed a brief drink outside at the King’s Head (a very charming pub theatre) before making our way to Almeida Theatre.

On their website, the theatre says:

They certainly achieved this with The Years, directed by Eline Arbo.

Any show whose opening lines include “A woman squats to urinate…” is going to be an interesting one, and The Years did not disappoint.

The play, which is based on a “hybrid” memoir by French writer Annie Ernaux, takes us on a journey through one woman’s life, from the 1940s to the mid 2000s. Each stage of her existence is wonderfully depicted by one of five actors: Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner.

I found the first few scenes of the play the most forgettable — perhaps because the haze of early childhood is the hardest for my adult self to relate to. But as soon as we entered Annie’s teenage years, charmingly brought to life by Anjli Mohindra, I quickly found myself laughing along as she experiences an enthusiastic sexual awakening  (featuring plenty of moaning and grinding on every available surface).

Evidently, the play doesn’t shy away in the slightest from topics like sex and masturbation. In fact, it lays them bare in a way that’s refreshing, centring and celebrating women’s pleasure at every stage of life.

It’s not all a joyful romp through, though. Annie’s sexual awakening quickly turns sour via a brutal encounter with an older man, which she narrates with painful clarity.

Undoubtedly the most powerful scene in the show — as well as the most difficult to endure — is the illegal abortion Annie goes through after finding herself pregnant and afraid as an unmarried woman in the early 60s. Romola Garai gives a phenomenal performance throughout this scene — so phenomenal, in fact, that two audience members became unwell and had to leave the theatre.

(Thankfully, we were all prepared for this scene to come, as we’d seen prior reviews describing how audience members had fainted during the previews. I wasn’t expecting the same thing to happen at our show, though.)

Although it didn’t quite make me queasy, I can sympathise with the reaction. The whole scene is played out in horrifying detail, complete with (mercifully fake) blood streaking Garai’s legs and arms. It’s not the blood I found most disturbing, however, but the unflinching narration of every aspect of the abortion. It’s downright gruesome.

That said, I’m glad they didn’t feel the need to remove the scene after multiple instances of audience members fainting. It was as powerfully moving as it was painful, and it helped me connect with the character of Annie (and the political backdrop her life plays out against) on a much deeper level.

On a lighter note, I was also very impressed by how well the play brought different time periods to life on stage. In particular, the 80s section came with a wonderful jazzercise performance of Tell It To My Heart by Taylor Dayne, which made it very hard to not get up and join in.

Overall, I loved Eline Arbo’s adaptation of The Years. The 2-hour runtime flew by in a flurry of emotions, and the ending took my breath away.

I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I purchased the book later in the week — hoping to relive the intense emotional rollercoaster all over again.

Hopefully it will be just as thrilling a ride.

Monika Jurczyk created our illustration, see more work on their website.