This is a play about time. How we live it, how we waste it, how we try to hold onto it before it slips away. And how, ultimately, the time we live in shapes how well we are able to execute it.
Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s epic novel, we follow one woman’s life from the end of the Second World War until the early 2000s. We watch her first dance, and we see her grown-up sons debate the merits of BlackBerries and iPods at the same table where she once bled.
Five actors embody the woman at different stages in her life. A life which rapidly unfolds before us like flicking through pages of a book. A book the character never quite manages to write. At ten, she declares that if she hasn’t published a novel by 25, she will kill herself. She is still talking about writing it in her final years. She longs to leave something behind—“to give form to a future I’m absent in.”
If one life can be played by five extraordinary actors, The Years suggests that her life is not just her own. She is every woman. She experiences her first dance, first kiss, first moment of shame, first inappropriate touch. She desires, she dreams, she fights to be seen as more than a role—mother, daughter, wife. The play is funny, too, using shocks for humour as much as for discomfort - a shoe and a backlit tablecloth is used to great effect in showing the woman's first foray in self-pleasure, which creates waves of ecstatic hysteria in the auditorium. The play expertly weaves the tragic with the comic with the beautifully mundane. It is an accurate and intimate portrayal of life, and the ups and downs we all must take as we journey through it.
The production prompts big questions: Who are we supposed to be? How will we be remembered? The Years does not offer an answer, only the aching reminder of what we must ask ourselves before it’s too late, and to enjoy the time we have whilst we’re here. And what an enjoyable time it is to spend 2 hours in its company. I urge everyone to go.
The Years plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 19th April 2025.