If your Valentine disappointed you this weekend, spare a thought for the protagonist of The Years, the explosive West End play based on the writings of the French novelist and Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. A teenager is thrilled to discover she has attracted the temporary attention of an older man at summer camp. After he painfully takes her virginity, she gradually realises that he has told half the resort. She finds the word “whore” scribbled across her bathroom mirror. Still she yearns for the validation of his returning desire.
The play takes as its subject the full range of life experiences contingent on embodied womanhood. Like the Ernaux memoir from which it draws its name, its heroine tells her story in the plural “we” and speaks for a generation of war-born French women. To the frustration of its artists, however, one of those experiences has captured all the headlines.
