The Years review: A heart-breaking and life-affirming celebration of womanhood
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| By
Sian McBride
The stage manager appears from the wings and the performance is stopped. We’re a third of the way into this beautifully tender and quietly profound production. But it is too much for some.
This interruption has happened more than once during The Years run, both on the West End and at the Almeida’s sold-out season. A quiet murmur of concern ripples through the theatre, audience members shift in their seats as one person grows faint and others feel too unwell to continue watching. The scene in question is not a spectacle of horror, not a gratuitous display of pain - something audiences at the Harold Pinter Theatre are used to seeing in the last few years - but rather something far more unsettling: a woman, alone in her home, undergoing the final stage of abortion without access to proper medical care. There is no dramatic score, no exaggerated cries, no buckets of blood. Instead, there is quiet sadness, and the weight of isolation as she narrates one of the most painful moments of her life. Her unbearable reality of being left to suffer without help.
And yet, here in the theatre, help arrives swiftly. Ushers move with practiced precision to assist those who are overwhelmed, offering the very care that the woman on stage is denied. The irony is inescapable. The audience is physically distressed by the mere act of witnessing what so many have had to endure in real life, yet the woman at the heart of this story has no such relief, no one rushing in to ease her pain. There is no sympathy to be given afterwards, just judgement and disgust.
The staging of this moment is delicate, handled with an emotional precision that refuses to turn it into spectacle. It is not a grotesque display but a devastatingly human one, a moment that lingers not because of what is seen, but because of what is felt. And if it is too much for some to bear, perhaps that only proves its necessity.
This is a play about time. How we live it, how we waste it, how we try to hold onto it before it slips away. And how, ultimately, the time we live in shapes how well we are able to execute it.
Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s epic novel, we follow one woman’s life from the end of the Second World War until the early 2000s. We watch her first dance, and we see her grown-up sons debate the merits of BlackBerries and iPods at the same table where she once bled.
Five actors embody the woman at different stages in her life. A life which rapidly unfolds before us like flicking through pages of a book. A book the character never quite manages to write. At ten, she declares that if she hasn’t published a novel by 25, she will kill herself. She is still talking about writing it in her final years. She longs to leave something behind—“to give form to a future I’m absent in.”
If one life can be played by five extraordinary actors, The Years suggests that her life is not just her own. She is every woman. She experiences her first dance, first kiss, first moment of shame, first inappropriate touch. She desires, she dreams, she fights to be seen as more than a role—mother, daughter, wife. The play is funny, too, using shocks for humour as much as for discomfort - a shoe and a backlit tablecloth is used to great effect in showing the woman's first foray in self-pleasure, which creates waves of ecstatic hysteria in the auditorium. The play expertly weaves the tragic with the comic with the beautifully mundane. It is an accurate and intimate portrayal of life, and the ups and downs we all must take as we journey through it.
The production prompts big questions: Who are we supposed to be? How will we be remembered? The Years does not offer an answer, only the aching reminder of what we must ask ourselves before it’s too late, and to enjoy the time we have whilst we’re here. And what an enjoyable time it is to spend 2 hours in its company. I urge everyone to go.
The Years plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 19th April 2025.