This adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s life-spanning novel had already caused a stir before opening night for featuring a 1960s backstreet abortion. Some audience members, mostly men, had fainted. That incident might serve as the ultimate rejoinder to critics of trigger warnings, many high-profile ones in recent times, and again, mostly men.
While it’s raw, it is a responsibly handled scene in an extraordinarily profound and yet playful drama spanning much of the 20th century from the point of view of one Frenchwoman. She is played here by five actors marking various phases of life, who remind us that a single life contains multitudes.
The woman is never named but she is born during the second world war, like Ernaux, living through postwar penury, the liberations of the swinging 60s, conflict with Algeria, hippy-dom, 1980s juggling of marriage, motherhood and teaching job, and on.
Directed by Eline Arbo, whose original Dutch adaptation premiered in The Hague in 2022, the story moves from personal history to the world at large and back again, like a camera changing focus, so we go from air raid sirens to French imperialism (“Algeria is France,” someone reflects), Vietnam, Aids, the invention of washing machines, the contraceptive pill, marriage, feminism, Bosnia, 9/11, immigration, Le Pen and the rise of the right. Big history is wrapped up in menstrual blood, semen, drugs, tears, ecstasies, the century not just surveyed or summarised but felt, and embodied, in womanhood.
The abortion scene, when it comes, is dramatised by Romola Garai and it is devastating, not only for its physical pain and blood but its sadness (“This thing has no place in language,” she says).
While this woman’s life is full of compromise, it is in no way a disappointment. Sexual expression and joy become key across the ages and it is joyous in itself to see this enacted so uninhibitedly on stage. The young woman’s raging hormones are made comically compulsive in masturbation scenes by Anjli Mohindra; the loss of virginity is enacted with masterful unease by Mohindra, encompassing a queasy, confusing and lonely experience. Young male lovers in older age are shown in sexy scenes between Deborah Findlay and Mohindra, while the overwhelming obsessive love that Ernaux has written about is made magnificently arch by Gina McKee (the lover becomes a brilliantly spinning chair), so that it seems to be gently satirised.
What looks at first like airiness in its staging has a forensic rigging. Wit and whimsy sits alongside darkness and you feel the protagonist’s blackest moments keenly but there is sisterliness, too, as other versions of the woman acknowledge the trauma of the moment.
Ernaux’s book is written with typically painful honestly, shorn of any cosy nostalgia – quite a feat when the story is all about looking back, and it might be a counterpoint to “Proustian” sentimentality. Here, the madeleines are photographic snapshots that set off each significant memory.
The book begins with a disconnected series of images, one of which is “a holiday table” around which people converse. This table is central to Juul Dekker’s set, everything from family meals to the woman’s first sexual experience plays out on it, its tablecloth held up as the backdrop to the photo snaps, or rumpled to suggest swaddle around a newborn.
Adapted into English by Stephanie Bain, some of the book’s passages are narrated while others are artfully turned into dialogue. Remarkably, the intelligent humanity of Ernaux’s Nobel prize-winning prose remains fully intact and might even be improved upon in its staging.
Music marks the ages, too, with actors singing beautifully in French and English (Taylor Dayne’s Tell It to My Heart, Desireless’s Voyage, Voyage, etc). Choreography helps the serious-to-silly tonal switches (including a fabulous Jane Fonda-style aerobics workout) and there is phenomenally emotional lighting design by Varja Klosse.
Running at near two hours straight though, you feel the passage of time, both in this protagonist’s life and your own. It leaves theoretical questions around history, memory and love in the mind, long after its end.
There is so much emotional depth, surprise and theatrical virtuosity here that it holds you rapt across the ages. What an accomplishment.
• At the Almeida theatre, London, until 31 August
