Review: THE YEARS, Harold Pinter Theatre

The West End is awash with adaptations but here is one which stands head and shoulders above the rest. Eline Arbo’s stage version of Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical masterpiece The Years ebbs and flows – sometimes a gushing river of emotion, sometimes a trickling stream of melancholy. Critics raved about its initial run at the Almedia Theatre last year. Can it make the leap from intimate space to grand West End playhouse?

The answer is a concrete yes – as proved by the now infamous abortion scene. The original sent queasy punters rushing out the Almeida. In the much vaster auditorium that is the Harold Pinter Theatre the graphic sequences still sent an audience member rushing out (at least at the perforamnce I attended, even with those punishing West End sight lines).

It should be worn out of a badge of honour – a testament to The Years’s power to magic up emotion from simple ingredients. Bar a handful of dripping red, the abortion scene’s graphicness reverbs through collective imagination, germinating from Ernaux’s precise but velvety language (deftly adapted by Stephanie Bain) and blossoming on stage from an-all-muscles-clenched Romola Garai. Arbo has woven a gorgeous interplay of stagecraft and storytelling that doesn’t just deserve a West End transfer but wholly justifies itself as theatrical adaptation.

On the face of it The Years is disarmingly straightforward. A woman’s life is mapped through different spheres: There’s the personal, the hard facts of her life fleshed out chronologically, youth in post war France, children, marriage. The political and social spheres of French liberation, Cold War, revolutions in Europe, and sexual liberation. And the psychological: her youthful exploration of sex, eroticism, romance. But Arbo lets them melt and bleed into each other, swirling, almost cosmic in scale, but always searingly tender. Femininity is the bridge that links each world, and the lens through which we see most of Annie’s life through.

Five actors pass the narrative baton between them. Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner navigate the sparks of youthful discovery; Garai is on the defence against the responsibilities and burdens of early adulthood; Gina McKee finds comfort in middle age renaissance, and Deborah Findlay is left reminiscing fading memories. Each brings a unique freshness, organic mannerisms that glimmer from within. But together they form a glowing ensemble, one that stretches the play’s muscles into each corner of the space.

Arbo’s stripped back vision comfortably blossoms in the Harold Pinter Theatre. Minimal props with white sheets stand in as the photographs that knit the books sequences together. Live-music renditions of steamy Joe Dassin and electro funk Voyage give each period tangible identity. In the bigger theatre it becomes a spectacle, as does the final, almost celestial, image – which I will not spoil here, but still that precious compassion throbs away in its affection heavy heart.

The Years plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 19 April

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