With this adventurous stroke, the Almeida yet again proves it is indispensable. Eline Arbo’s production of Annie Ernaux’s Les Années – The Years – gives new life to the uneasy relationship between page and stage, showing that adaptation can be not simply piggybacking but revelation. Arbo’s reimagining, first seen two years ago at Het Nationale Theater in The Hague, and now heard in an English version by Stephanie Bain, cleaves open an important piece of literature and makes its significance glow.
Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 2022, generated a new mixture of memoir and history with her 2008 book: an account of a life – her own – and the life of France, which stretched from 1941 to 2006, intermeshing intimate anecdote and public events, political change and private disruption. This was no confessional blurt: though particular, it was also collective; the narrator is a “we”, not an “I”. Most strikingly for a writer from the land of Proust, Les Années took apart the idea of memory.
One of Ernaux’s truths is that we become strangers to our earlier selves. This is embodied brilliantly in Arbo’s production, in which the main character is played by five different actors, varied in shape, height, colour, age, accent, pitch of voice, cast of feature. Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner are glorious – and continually unexpected.
Findlay, up to now most prized (very highly) by me for her witty insinuation, unleashes a fleshy wildness as she bursts into the part of a rampaging infant. Rose-Bremner sprints radiantly past her memorable performance in the RSC’s Hamnet: her peachy voice alone must guarantee her a big role in any new musical.
Parlez-Moi d’Amour interweaves through the action suggestively, yet most sexual encounters are more candid, the consequences more explosive, sometimes brutal. A scene in which powerful Garai sweats and fights her way through a backstage abortion – the more terrible because she is so fiery – became famous before press night as causing men to exit, some say faint. As remarkable is Mohindra’s exhilarating discovery of masturbation, which involves her in extended acrobatic congress with a table. Meanwhile, McKee reveals a tremendous talent for comedy. Twirling a chair in one hand, she elegantly considers her mature passion for a younger lover: it is as if she were nonchalantly stripping him.
World events – the Algerian war, the May 68 demonstrations – are narrated, not enacted. As are some private moments. Ernaux unwinds her narrative through accounts of a series of photographs. Here a white sheet (which at one point is scrunched up and cradled to become a baby) serves as a backdrop in front of which the women pose at irregular intervals. Descriptions of the resulting snaps are read out and performed. Required to show “an absence of a wish to please”, McKee narrows her eyes so that her face is smoothed into a mask of noncompliance. You might think the expression too small to register in a theatre. Yet these actors make everything count.
It is not hard to see why Pericles is seldom produced: I reckon I’ve seen about seven productions. Thought to be only partly by Shakespeare – George Wilkins is usually blamed for the worst bits – its plot skitters all over the place: death at sea, incest, tyranny, pirates, jerky motion with disconcerting gaps. Which would matter less if it were more fully dramatised. As it is, there is more description of action than real development. There is no central pulse.
This makes it ripe for takeover by directors with concepts. That and the fact that with mass migration and exile, some of its most improbable elements have begun to look like prophecy. About 20 years ago, a production by Cardboard Citizens, the company specialising in theatre for and with homeless people, imagined the characters as asylum seekers, sent across the ocean in crates.
In her directorial debut at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she has just reached the end of her first year as joint artistic director, Tamara Harvey is having none of that. No updating, no underlining of modern echoes. Her production emphasises the fairytale wonders and absurdities of the play, lacing it with humour. The result, after a slow start, is attractive but not urgent.
Jonathan Fensom’s design hangs thick ropes at the back of the stage and loops them overhead. The effect is partly nautical, partly that of an exclusive gym. We might be caught in a wonderful Conrad Shawcross sculpture. Under the musical direction of Elinor Peregrin, gusts of brass and woodwind and percussion blow through the action; characters move with trance-like slowness. Ryan Day’s lighting is warm; Kinnetia Isidore’s costumes are bright pinks and purples and azures: in an acute touch, the future harmony of one couple is suggested by their almost matching gold-trimmed royal blue costumes.
The verse, as intermittent as the plot, is particularly well delivered by Alfred Enoch, who makes Pericles innocent, open and guileless without ever seeming merely a pushover. In an illuminating departure, the role of narrator, traditionally a crusty old chap, is given to Rachelle Diedericks’s finely candid, direct Marina, the lost daughter reclaiming her voice. Christian Patterson cheers things along as a rumble-voiced comic Simonides.
I think of this as Shakespeare’s most insect-aware drama: not for its mention of caterpillar and glow-worm but for the disarming line that conjures up tender-hearted Marina: “I trod upon a worm against my will, / But I wept for it.” Not perhaps enough to put the play at the centre of Shakespearean studies, but enough to pique the curiosity.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Years ★★★★★
Pericles ★★★
The Years is at the Almeida, London, until 31 August
Pericles is at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 21 September
