Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The French Nobel prize-winner Annie Ernaux’s life-writing is hard to classify, mixing memoir and fiction, deeply personal yet aiming for universality. In The Years, widely seen as her masterpiece, the facts of her life are related with the encompassing “we” rather than the exclusive “I”. Born in 1940, she’s fascinated with the way the self moves within the flow of time. Eline Arbo, who directed and adapted this version first for the Netherlands, has opened out the text by having five performers each take on aspects of “Annie” as she reaches various eras and ages.Each segment begins with a “photograph” of her, enacted before a white sheet. The stage is bare to the brick wall at the back; a table sits central. Small Annie listens to older relatives discussing the war years with the familiar “the young don’t know they’re born” refrain. The action will turn full circle eventually, with older Annie looking in bemusement at the modern world, the life cycle literalised by the circular rail on the floor.In an ensemble featuring such eminences as Romola Garai, Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay, the younger cast members need to hold their nerve, and Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner do not disappoint. Ernaux is noted for her sexual frankness and almost everyone gets a masturbation scene. Mohindra’s exuberant teenage table-humping and frotting express a raunchy humour one suspects is lacking in the original. Her later scene of semi-coerced sex at summer camp underlines the sheer slipperiness of consent (and the values of another era).Annie transcends her working-class background to study philosophy, and swings into Sixties Paris with its politics and feminism. Clever costuming (Rebekka Wörmann) has Garai ditch her black trousers so her tunic can become a minidress. Garai performs the most visceral scene powerfully — shock, despair and pain grinding against the steely detachment with which the author’s trauma is described. It is impossible to watch without a shudder. Garai stands motionless while the other performers silently wash down the bloodied table and swab her arms and legs. The sheet is pegged like others to the back wall; the stained visual record of a woman’s life.Rose-Bremner impresses with her impish energy, drumming and singing, not least with a creditable rendition of the backing vocal on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky”. (We have moved on from chansons.) McKee and Findlay bring a gallant vulnerability to the older Annie, but they can do youthful too: one of the funniest scenes has them as Annie’s young sons enjoying a food fight — that mucky tablecloth gets pinned to the wall too. Props are magicked into being by sleight of hand and misdirection.What is brilliant about this concept is that, as the action moves from postwar to post-millennium, every audience member will find their place somewhere. (I relished the Eighties “feel the burn” aerobics sequence.) By being so intimately self-involved, Ernaux can speak eloquently for women; in fact, for anyone with an open mind and a pulse. ★★★★★To August 31, almeida.co.uk
