The Years (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Annie Ernaux

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 72

Beschreibung

'Memory pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.' She strikes a pose and the camera shutter clicks... A child playing in the debris of the Second World War. Click. A student discovering parties and men's bodies. Click. An activist fighting for the right to choose. Click. A wife picking out a velvet sofa. Click. A mother taking her eldest to judo. Click. A lover, seducing a younger man. Click. A grandmother presenting her granddaughter to the camera. Click. The Years/Les années is Annie Ernaux's critically acclaimed 'masterpiece' (Guardian), charting a woman's personal and political life against the backdrop of a rapidly changing post-war Europe. Eline Arbo's inventive stage adaptation was premiered as De jaren by Het Nationale Theater in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2022. It was first performed, in an English-language version by Stephanie Bain – after the translations by Alison L. Strayer and Tanya Leslie – at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2024, with a cast of five women collectively bringing to life the story of one woman, and a whole continent. 'Nothing short of theatrical magic' De Nederlandse Toneeljury

Leseprobe

THE YEARS

based on the book by

Annie Ernaux

adapted and directed by

Eline Arbo

in an English version by

Stephanie Bain

from the English-language translations by

Alison L. Strayer and Tanya Leslie

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Original Production Details

The Years

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Les années was first adapted for the stage and performed in Dutch as De jaren, as a co-production between Het Nationale Theater and International Theater Amsterdam, at Theater Aan Het Spui, The Hague, Netherlands, on 2 November 2022, with the following cast:

Mariana Aparicio

Nettie Blanken

Tamar van den Dop

Hannah Hoekstra

June Yanez

Director and Adapter

Eline Arbo

Original Book Writer

Annie Ernaux

Translator

Rokus Hofstede

Music Supervisor and Sound Designer

Thijs van Vuure

Set Designer

Juul Dekker

Costume Designer

Rebekka Wörmann

Lighting Designer

Varja Klosse

Dramaturgy

Willemijn Barelds

Assistant Director

Ludy Golstein

It was first performed in English as The Years at the Almeida Theatre, London, on 27 July 2024, with the following changes to the cast and creative team:

Deborah Findlay

Romola Garai

Gina McKee

Anjli Mohindra

Harmony Rose-Bremner

English Adapter

Stephanie Bain

Casting Director

Amy Ball

Costume Supervisor

Heidi Bryan

Wigs, Hair and Make-up Supervisor

Sophia Khan

Vocal Coach

Matt Smith

Associate Director

Yasmin Hafesji

Characters

ANNIE 1, Annie from nine to fifteen

ANNIE 2, Annie from sixteen to twenty-two

ANNIE 3, Annie from twenty-three to thirty-nine

ANNIE 4, Annie from forty to fifty-nine

ANNIE 5, Annie from sixty

This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so maydiffer slightly from the play as performed.

Prologue

ANNIE 2 All the images will disappear:

ANNIE 4 the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot after the war

ANNIE 3 the woman shut into a box pierced all the way through by men with silver spears emerging alive because it was a magic trick called ‘The Martyrdom of Women’

ANNIE 1 the face of Simone Signoret on a poster for Thérèse Raquin

ANNIE 4 the hundreds of petrified faces, photographed by the authorities before deportation to the camps, on the walls of a room in the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in the mid-1980s

ANNIE 5 all the twilight images of early childhood, the pools of light from a summer Sunday

ANNIE 2 Scarlett O’Hara, in Gone with the Wind, dragging the body of the Yankee soldier she has just killed up the stairs

ANNIE 3 the images that follow us all the way into sleep, the real or the imaginary ones.

ANNIE 5 They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of our grandparents, dead for half a century, and of our parents, also dead. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Memory pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

ANNIE 2 Suddenly, thousands of words will disappear, words used to name things, faces, acts and feelings, to put the world in order, make the heart beat and the sex grow moist.

ANNIE 1 Slogans, graffiti in public toilets, on walls in the street, poems and dirty jokes, headlines

ANNIE 3 dreadful sentences that should’ve been forgotten: you look like a decrepit whore

ANNIE 1 the words of men in bed at night: Do with me what you will, I am your plaything

ANNIE 3 outdated expressions, heard again by chance: old geezer, hullabaloo, a turn-up for the books!

ANNIE 5 Where were you on 9/11?

ANNIE 4 The old brand names, the memories of which delighted you more than those of better-known brands: Dulsol shampoo, Cardon chocolate, Nadi coffee.

ANNIE 2 Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to express it. Nothing will come out of an open mouth, neither I nor me. In conversation around a festive table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Scene One

1941–1948

ANNIE 1 tries to portray the person in the photo, according tothe description.

ANNIE 5 It is an oval-shaped, sepia photo.

Below, the words: Photo-Moderne, Lillebonne,1946.

A girl of about six years old with a serious, almost sad expression, despite her nice plump face under short hair parted down the middle, stands in front of a carved table. She bulges out of her bodice, her skirt with shoulder straps hiked up a little over her protruding belly.

All the relatives will have received a print.

ANNIE 1 On holiday afternoons after the war, amidst the interminable slowness of meals, time appeared out of nowhere and began to take shape.

ANNIE 3 The voices of the guests flowed together to compose the great narrative of collective events.

ANNIE 1 They never grew tired of talking about the winter of ’42, which was freezing…

ANNIE 5 is Mother, ANNIE 4 is Aunt, ANNIE 2 is Niece.

ANNIE 5 It was ice cold! Ice cold!

ANNIE 4 The blood literally froze in our veins.

ANNIE 5 We slept with our shoes on, otherwise our toes would’ve fallen off.

ANNIE 4 Even the turnips were frozen.

ANNIE 5 (Laughs.) The turnips! The only thing the Krauts hadn’t taken from us.

ANNIE 4 At least we had turnips, people were starving in the streets.

ANNIE 5 Terrible. The shops looted, the rations were –

ANNIE 4 – never enough.

ANNIE 5 When we got butter on the black market, we’d cry with joy.

ANNIE 4 I’ll never forget the smell of that turnip.

ANNIE 5 I know what I’ll never forget: that air-raid siren!

She makes the sound of an air-raid siren.

ANNIE 4 And then the V-2s,

ANNIE 5 in the middle of the night, hunger gnawing at our stomachs, and then that sound – what should we do? Run away? What if we’re running right in the direction of the bomb? Or stay? Waiting. Hoping. Waiting. Hoping. And then –

She makes the sounds of bombs hitting.

Never again…

ANNIE 1 A story full of hunger and fear, told in the ‘we’ voice, as if everyone were equally affected.

ANNIE 3 But they only spoke of what they had seen and could relive. Not the Jewish children boarding trains for Auschwitz, nor the bodies of starvation victims collected every morning from the Warsaw Ghetto, nor the ten-thousand-degree fires in Hiroshima.

They sing ‘Ah! Le petit vin blanc’ and ‘Fleur deParis’, and the chorus is shouted along, ‘bleu-blanc-rouge sont les couleurs de la patrie’, indeafening harmony.

ANNIE 5 (Laughs.) Another thing the Krauts can’t take!

ANNIE 2 It’s so boring living now, compared to the war.

ANNIE 1 Like you’d know.

ANNIE 2 I actually lived through the war.

ANNIE 1 Yeah, but you can’t remember anything – you were too small.

ANNIE 2 I was still there.

ANNIE 1 Yeah, as a baby.

(Sigh.)

I wish I had to flee, take to the road in a band and sleep on straw. Make a fire and look at the stars. Get candy from the Americans!

ANNIE 2 Oh! Should we go to the ruins?

ANNIE 5 You two best stay away from the rubble.

ANNIE 4 It’s in the newspaper: Do not touch munitions!

ANNIE 5 Precisely.

ANNIE 1 But Mum!

ANNIE 5 Just be grateful you’re alive and you’ve got your head on your shoulders.

ANNIE 3 They were saddled with other people’s memories and a secret nostalgia for the time they’d missed by so little. Only later would they learn to put the events in the correct order.

ANNIE 1 and 2   The Capitulation

the Exodus

the Occupation

the Landing

the Victory

ANNIE 5 the Liberation! The war was over. I’ll never forget it. You could get everything again: Bananas, National Lottery tickets, fireworks!

ANNIE 4 You know what I’ll never forget? The ration coupons for oil and sugar, the disgusting corn bread that sat like a brick in your stomach.

ANNIE 5 We flocked to the funfair, the lantern parade, the circus. We went to church, to market – there were people on the streets from early morning to late at night. Life was outside!

ANNIE 4 (Taking out a photo.) Look, Annie, that’s you!

ANNIE 2 Fat baby.

ANNIE 1 And who is that?

ANNIE 5 That’s your great-grandmother.

ANNIE 4 And there’s your uncle, who tragically passed away – the Spanish flu.

ANNIE 5 Her uncle died from a kick from a horse.

ANNIE 4 Not that uncle. Her other uncle!

ANNIE 5 He died in the war.

ANNIE 4 I’m not talking about him either, I’m talking about this uncle.

ANNIE 5 Who? Oh no, that’s your great-uncle.

ANNIE 1 (At another photo.) And who’s this?

ANNIE 4 No, Annie.

ANNIE 5