A FEMALE EVOLUTION, FRANK AND FINE
First salute the cast: Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra
and Harmony Rose-Bremner, for an unpretentiously powerful tour de force. Each is
required in turn to narrate, to take the centre and become a supporting act, and to
evoking ages from infancy to the seventh decade with wit, deftness and feeling. Five
wonderful performances, shading from profundity to comedy, make Eline Arbo’s
play of Annie Ernaux’ memoir deserve the raves it got at the Almeida.
Full disclosure: I am going to be unwontedly personal. Because The Years
evokes my period, less a decade: it shows a woman going through life from a 1940s
childhood to our own century. Its narration reminds us of world events , inventions
and trends (reminiscent of that endearing Harry Beck play, https://theatrecat.com/
2024/11/12/the-truth-about-harry-beck-london-transport-museum/) . And having
been born exactly ten years after Ernaux I felt its truth like an elder sister’s story.
Especially as it is set in France, where I was a pre-teen for four years singing the
same hymns as the schoolgirl stage selves, as devoted to Piaf as they were, and
responding to the same crises (Algeria: walking home from school in Lille I saw a
man shot in the street).
So the convent childhood and the postwar and Cold War chat rang eerily true.
The adolescent yearnings and sexual curiosity are every girl’s (though I was not as
heroic a masturbator as evoked by Mohindra). And while I escaped the worst,
equally recognizable is her pitiful confused surrender of virginity to a lout: at one
point in the oaf’s bedroom knowing she could leave but saying “I have no right to
abandon this man in the state he’s in”. Ah yes: even ten years later we girls were
being fed the legend that an aroused boy would be somehow dangerously damaged if
you didnt let him complete the job.
It is a female life story both playful and rueful, honest and sometimes self
mocking: when these ‘60s girls, barely adult though they are graduates, felt it vital
to be in a couple and soon home with a baby, their chatter about having found this
desired happiness is tinged with an edge of doubt (this is what we wanted, what
have we done, will that book we dreamed of ever get written?). Perfect: so is the
sudden liberation of 1968 and then the hippie days, jolting them out into rebellion and
feminism. Again, having the luck to still be only a teenager when things changed I
had watched these young matrons suddenly feeling their wings, envying us their
unburdened little sisters.
Family life chaos follows, then the having-in-all working-mother exhaustion
and the vertigo of suddenly realizing as the middle generation that you are in charge,
children dependent, parents old and frail. It’s all set in a series of photographs,
wittily posed in front of sheets and I love the Mum-on-Holiday one , in an
unflattering dress and evoking “fatigue, and the absence of a desire to please”. But
then comes divorce, regret, children becoming adult, time-wasting obsession with a
new lover (who goes back to his wife), a dalliance with far younger men. And behind
it that middle-aged amazement at suddenly no longer being the hub of a great wheel
of family, but alone…
I should mention the abortion scene, a talking point after some audience, mainly
apparently male, fainted in the Almeida. In fact Garai’s evocation of miscarriage
after a brutal backstreet abortion is done as it should be, with elegant brutality and
deep sadness. But someone who clearly can’t read trigger warnings, reviews or
theatre news did bring the show to a halt on press night, having to be ushered out
while the cast stood calm behind a lone stage manager (male, poor devil, doing his
announcement with the bloodstained sheet still on the table). Then as the tale moved
on, and the women became a row of young mothers discussing babysitters and
cooking for the in-laws, another ticketed weakling forced a second break. Which
culminated I am happy to say in a round of applause and cheers for patient cast and
put-upon SM. Curious, though, in an age where you can hardly spend a week of
classic theatre without someone booting a bloodstained polystyrene head around the
stage.
And it was undeserved. Because this was a beautiful and honest piece of theatre,
ripe with pity and laughter, exaggerating and exploiting nothing. I wish them all
many shows with less triggering.
haroldpintertheatre.co.uk. to 12 April
theatreCat 