Time flows through you; The Years of Eline Arbo at HNT as poignant as it is stunning

Squeezing village society and family, escape with harsh deflowering, student pleasures crushed by bloody abortion, inescapable marriage and childbearing, scorching relationships with men, fierce longing with loneliness, and finally resignation with grandchild; against the backdrop of war, reconstruction, stifled revolution, years of hope and finally in prosperity and cynicism extinguished idealism.

Time flows through Annie, Annie flows through time. Five women articulate the awesome imagination that director Eline Arbo puts into The Years; one of the magisterial books that recently brought Annie Ernaux the Nobel Prize for Literature¸ "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she exposes the roots, estrangements and collective limitations of personal memory."

Tears

Immediately, this Nobel Prize was added to the National Theatre's information on The Years. The play doesn't need it. It is so horribly beautiful, another highlight in Dutch theatre history. You wish every Dutch person that for an evening she doesn't have to turn on those terrible chatter shows on television to fill the time until sleep with unbearable lightness, but gets to see this play.

"To cry so beautiful", sang Maarten van Roozendaal and with The Years I felt tears welling up. Don't even know why, the realisation of one's own impermanence, of all that striving and struggling in a troubled life with fierce attempts to stifle the pains in overwhelming beauty of images, faces and voices you may enjoy. Of grandmothers (14 and 7 children) and a mother (5 children) who went through life as a birthing housewife, by the way not at all 'pathetic'. Like Annie who, like many women, did conquer a second life of freedom after her marriage.

Deflower and abortion

Feet on the floor: what is the show about? Annie's life played by (successively and interchangeably) June Yanez, Hannah Hoekstra, Mariana Aparicio, Tamar van den Dop and Nettie Blanken. In a white setting with a large table at which the French family passes the trivia of the village, family and optimism about the future after the war. And on which the deflowering and gruesome abortion also take place, after which the tablecloths with blood and slogans reflect the spirit of the times; at the end flapping above the set as history. In which men kept women under their thumb for a long time.

And a still immaculate sheet as a backdrop for periodic photographs, provided with place and date in text, like the standing still of time; juxtaposed against the movement of that same time with carts with record players and musical instruments on rails wheeled around the stage. Used to lard the piece with stirring French chansons appropriate to the periods, briefly interrupted by American protest music late 1960s with the revolution in Paris.

The woman(s) Annie wrestles from the social and sexual oppression of their time, a struggle for a full place in society, to feel known as she is and wants to live. Little by little, she takes her life into her own hands.

Years of pondering

Annie Ernaux is from 1940, wrote thousands of notes for The Years which finally came out in 2008, she was 68 at the time. At the end of play, the elder Anna rationally explains the how and why of the book again, the only element I didn't like; no need to name what the audience has been watching all evening.

Otherwise, De Jaren is a sequence of fascinating scenes by five actresses at the top of their game, who push boundaries with musical excursions. Did not know that Tamar van den Dop, who I liked even better than the rest - but that will undoubtedly be due to her equal age - can sing so beautifully. But above all, the unity of play of the bouquet of convincing actresses, the brilliant harmony of Eline Arbo's hard-hitting lyrics and the great musical support make The Years a pleasure to experience.

We look at the history of our mothers and grandmothers, their hard-won liberation from a yoke of Christian morality that Ernaux observes more as zeitgeist in wonder than blunt feminist rejection. She does not ostentatiously accuse, but raucously describes her metamorphoses through time. Eline Arbo captured that perfectly. It is admirable that the only 36-year-old Arbo manages to capture that retrospective of a 68-year-old so well.

Beyond shame

Margot Dijkgraaf followed Ernaux for NRC for many years and online there is another great interview with Ernaux from April 1998 just after The Shame (La Honte) was released. "That's when shame entered my life, for good. I was ashamed of my parents, of the divorced women around me, of the drunken customers in our pub, of their flat language..."

Annie has overcome that embarrassment in The Years, in which, on the contrary, she exhibits razor-sharp her own role in the interplay of time and morality, neither averse to opportunism - new young love - nor to cynicism - two sons who god better have their fiercest discussion about Apple and Windows. She is historian of her time, sociologist of a society and psychologist of her movements as an individual.

The Years is a play by and for women and beforehand I thought: why are men actually welcome in the auditorium? How much more intimate can this get with purely women? But it is good as a man to be confronted so harshly with a culture in which you were brought up, with women's oppression from a Christian morality in which, as the dominant sex, you had no concept of the pain of menstruation, abortion, sexual repression and menopause.

Western women are now free, Christian morality is largely marginalised in Europe, but this does not lessen the struggles of women, of all people. They hurt each other, regardless of religion, gender or regime.

Until you experience intimate happiness with a grandchild on your lap, through the wistfulness of realising that the final phase has arrived.

Good to know

See also the trailer of The Years and the Q&A with actresses, and listen to the podcast series by Laura van Zuijlen.

The Years from The National Theatre, seen 3 November 2022 at Theater aan het Spui, can still be seen until 10 December in Amsterdam, Haarlem, Dordrecht, Enschede, Alkmaar, Groningen, Maastricht, Utrecht, Nijmegen, Amstelveen, Den Bosch, The Hague and Rotterdam.