‘I cut my knees open’: Romola Garai on the agonies unleashed by hit play The Years
Good sex, bad sex, the horror of aerobics and the tyranny of camcorders … the actor writes about starring in Nobel-winner Annie Ernaux’s memoir, our play of the year
hen people ask me what The Years is like, I’m not sure how to answer. The play is an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s slim book in which, with scalpel-like prose, she details her life from the end of the second world war to present-day France. From a provincial childhood to grammar school and university, she moves through the 1960s counterculture and changes to the social order, then on into motherhood and life in the suburbs, our all-encompassing capitalism, the freedom of divorce and a late-flowering sexual awakening.
Yet this is a totally incomplete way to describe it as a piece of theatre. “Annie” is played by five different actors of different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. We play her in different periods of her life and also play the other characters: her mother, priest, uncle, children, university friends and many lovers.
The Years is unlike anything I have ever done – possibly any play you have ever seen – in that the actors tell the story of Annie communally. We hold the story between us, making it together instead of pushing different arguments backwards and forwards. Because there are no oppositional relationships in The Years, it strikes at the heart of the power structures that dominate art, just as they dominate life. Arguments are not “won” or “lost” by the force of will, or the force of the performance, but are something that we make between us and the audience….