When people ask me what The Years is like, I’m not sure how to answer. The play is an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s slim book in which, with scalpel-like prose, she details her life from the end of the second world war to present-day France. From a provincial childhood to grammar school and university, she moves through the 1960s counterculture and changes to the social order, then on into motherhood and life in the suburbs, our all-encompassing capitalism, the freedom of divorce and a late-flowering sexual awakening.
Yet this is a totally incomplete way to describe it as a piece of theatre. “Annie” is played by five different actors of different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. We play her in different periods of her life and also play the other characters: her mother, priest, uncle, children, university friends and many lovers.
