Almeida, London; Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
Extraordinary performances from five actors all playing the writer Annie Ernaux add up to a five-star adaptation of her Nobel prize-winning book. And a fairytale take on Pericles
With this adventurous stroke, the Almeida yet again proves it is indispensable. Eline Arbo’s production of Annie Ernaux’s Les Années – The Years – gives new life to the uneasy relationship between page and stage, showing that adaptation can be not simply piggybacking but revelation. Arbo’s reimagining, first seen two years ago at Het Nationale Theater in The Hague, and now heard in an English version by Stephanie Bain, cleaves open an important piece of literature and makes its significance glow.
Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 2022, generated a new mixture of memoir and history with her 2008 book: an account of a life – her own – and the life of France, which stretched from 1941 to 2006, intermeshing intimate anecdote and public events, political change and private disruption. This was no confessional blurt: though particular, it was also collective; the narrator is a “we”, not an “I”. Most strikingly for a writer from the land of Proust, Les Années took apart the idea of memory.
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