The Years, Almeida Theatre review - matchless acting quintet makes for a must-see

The title sounds as if we ought to be in for an evening of Virginia Woolf, and, indeed, one of the astonishing women on view (Deborah Findlay) was in fact a co-star of the recent West End version of Orlando. In fact, this late-summer offering is a scorching reminder of the power of European theatre at a venue, the Almeida, that has of late focused its attentions (often very well) on the American repertoire, from Tennessee Williams to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, amongst others.

I also can't remember a show that has foregrounded women so formidably. The French writer Annie Ernaux's 2008 "hybrid memoir" may seem an unlikely candidate for theatrical transcription, as Maggie Nelson's Bluets – seen just recently at the Royal Court – was before it. Both demand cunning, keen-eyed adaptors, as Les Années has found en route to becoming The Years courtesy first Eline Arbo and then, for the English-language version, Stephanie Bain, who is the theatre's Head of Programming and Literary. (Her full title sounds as if a word has gone missing.) Seen in 2022 in Holland, directed by Arbo who repeats the assignment here, the show chronicles a woman's life apportioned between five sensational performers, who pass the proverbial baton that is the script as if running a relay race unfettered all the way to the finish line. Photographs contextualise time and place, as do musical cues and references to defining people (Marine le Pen, Salman Rushdie) and places (Auschwitz, Algeria).

But for all the backdrop afforded the narrative of the composite figure of Annie who emerges in bold relief before us, the production essentially tracks a person – mind and body given equal weight – across a life. We sense her adolescent awakening, sex and sexual desire a leitmotif throughout, and the way in which age confers wisdom and enlightenment alongside a bewilderment at a younger generation whose shared lexicon may not be available to their elders.

These themes are judiciously set forth across 60 or so years of the Annie character's evolving existence, the cast taking the lead in playing Annie in accordance with their actual ages: the expert Anjli Mohindra, a younger company member, accordingly plays the youthful, sexually questing Annie who furiously sets about discovering her own body. 

It's Romola Garai (pictured above, right), soon to shift across town to Giant at the Royal Court, who gets the production's most contentious set piece: a take-no-prisoners account of an abortion that has resulted in fainting audience members and show stops while playgoers are helped out of the auditorium. Let it be said on the record that this recollection amounts to a tiny fraction of a show able at the same time to find humour aplenty along the way and that Garai delivers the monologue with pitch-perfect clarity, her reckoning from a grievous frontline of pain never once devolving into sensationalism. 

But all the performers shine, attired in raiments of black and white that suggest the period (Garai could have stepped out of La Dolce Vita) whilst all the while possessed of an innate chic that speaks to the confidence of the performer. Findlay joins Gina McKee in a shared interlude in French, and the former is hilarious later on as a small boy keeping pace with a house full of women. Garai shows Annie at her most self-dramatising, nursing the novel she wants to bring to fruition by age 25, and McKee appears, movingly, to mop up the blood that remains of the aborted foetus, Harmony Rose-Bremner completing the quintet with the requisite mixture of calm and concern, as required. 

The billowing sheets are marked with words like "whore" that attest to the occasionally scabrous nature of a show whose tenderness is simultaneously writ large, not least in the seamless interplay amongst a cast who act together as if they have been part of this ensemble for, well, years. Some may baulk at the fleeting attention given world events, many of which could (and have) prompted plays and films of their own. But the point here is to put an individual under a microscope to which we are allowed unique, privileged access. Besides, how many shows give you, as is said here, "life and death in the same breath"? I shall remember The Years for many a theatre season to come.

• The Years at the Almeida to 31 August 
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