‘Each time I read one of her books, I wanted to read more’: five actors on bringing Annie Ernaux’s memoir to the stage

Annie Ernaux was 61 years old when, “one September morning” in 2001, two planes crashed into New York’s twin towers. “Our image of the world was turned upside down,” she wrote in her powerful collective autobiography The Years. “We saw the right was advancing everywhere. We turned away. We focused on ourselves again… we were mutating. We didn’t know what our new shape would be.”

For the actor Anjli Mohindra, the event evokes a more personal mutation. She had just turned 11 and started at secondary school. Her first period had begun the previous day. “I’d forgotten about it until we started rehearsing,” she says, but the memory swam back into her mind because, as well as dealing with world events, Ernaux is fascinated by the evolution of her own body. “I don’t want to say she’s obsessed, but she thinks a lot about her menstrual cycle and her menopause and things like that.”

Mohindra is one of five actors who are playing the Nobel prize-winning author (born 1940) at different stages of her life, in a stage adaptation that sticks faithfully to the book while dramatising one of Ernaux’s central points – that to look back on a life is not to see one continuous person but a series of people shaped by the fashions, technologies, opportunities and setbacks of the precise moment at which they are observed. “It will be a slippery narrative,” wrote the author, “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.”

It is in the spirit of Ernaux – who describes herself as “the ethnographer of my own life” – that I find myself in an upstairs room at a north London club one unseasonably drizzly morning delving into the lives and times of the five actors who will represent her. First up are Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay, who play her older selves, respectively from 40-59 and from 60 upwards. They are quietly spoken and circumspect in their answers, reluctant to make simplistic parallels between Ernaux’s experience and their own. Then in bounce Romola Garai, Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner, who play her younger selves, brimming with insights on a woman’s lot, then and now.

The play divides Annie’s life into 12 time zones, each introduced by an old photograph. The twin towers attack happens in the 11th of these sections, which spans from 1999 to 2006 and opens with a picture of Ernaux on a seaside holiday with her two adult sons. “How can these men be her children?” asks Annie Two, who will be played by Mohindra. She is the second youngest of the five incarnations, representing the author between the ages of 16 and 22, so her astonishment at what has come to pass in succeeding decades has a bittersweet irony.

The show is the creation of the Norwegian director Eline Arbo and comes to London trailing superlatives from its premiere in the Hague in 2022. It is “a dazzling history of a time and of a life”, enthused one newspaper. “Time flows through Annie, Annie flows through time,” wrote another. For Arbo, who took over Amsterdam’s trailblazing Internationaal Theater Amsterdam last year from its longstanding maestro Ivo van Hove, it combines two of the interests that have shaped her reputation as one of Europe’s most exciting new directors: a French tradition of sociological autobiography, which she had explored two years earlier in an adaptation of Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy, and the powerful female interiority of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Federico García Lorca’s Yerma, both of which she directed in 2021.

The Dutch production of The Years was in mid-run when Ernaux was awarded the Nobel prize in literature, “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she exposes the roots, estrangements and collective limitations of personal memory”. Though the author has been publishing for nearly 50 years and has long been feted in France, where she is one of the few female authors to appear on school curriculums, she only began to be widely noticed in the anglophone world when The Years was shortlisted for the International Booker prize in 2019. All of her books circle around her own life, but she describes them as fiction rather than memoir. McKee discovered her after hearing about the forthcoming Almeida production. “It was the gateway to wanting to read more of Annie’s work. And actually, I wish I had come to it before I read The Years. I did it sort of upside down. And each time I read one of her books, I wanted to read more. I went on this frenzied read quest,” says the Bafta-winning and Olivier-nominated actor, whose recent roles range from a steely counter-terrorism chief in Jed Mercurio’s hit miniseries Bodyguard, to Gareth Southgate’s right-hand woman in Dear England at the National Theatre.

The stage adaptation of The Years begins in northern France, with a photograph of Ernaux aged about six years old: “Serious, almost sad despite her nice plump face under short hair parted down the middle… She bulges out of her bodice, her skirt, with shoulder straps hiked up a little over her protruding belly.” The second world war had recently ended but has a vivid presence in the anecdotes of her parents. The little plump girl would go on to fulfil the hopes of her socially ambitious mother by excelling at school and leaving her family home above a struggling grocery store for the bohemian life of a student in Paris. “Studying is her weapon of choice against stagnating into a kind of femininity that arouses her pity,” writes Ernaux.

At 76, Findlay, who grew up in Surrey, is closest to Ernaux in age. “She was of the generation that was the first to do so many things, like go to university, and to have the pill, and all that resulted from that,” she says. “I think of my generation as following on behind her, but you do feel like you have been part of trailblazing a lot of things as well. I was the first person in my family to go to university, for example. Now, lots of people in my family do.” Findlay, whose own claims to history include being part of the original production of Caryl Churchill’s feminist classic Top Girls at the Royal Court in 1982, slid into her extremely successful career via an English degree at the University of Leeds, where she a bunch of people who introduced her to street theatre. “I didn’t go to drama school or anything like that. So it was a bit of a random journey. I’ve done all my learning in front of people,” she says.

In the play as in the book, Ernaux constantly indexes her own development against world events, so which are formative ones that have stuck in the memories of the cast? For Findlay, it is the assassination of the US president John F Kennedy. “I can absolutely remember where I was. I was at school, and this sort of ripple went around.” For both Mohindra, who is 34, and Garai, who is 41, it is the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, which Ernaux also references: “I remember that, because it was unthinkable, and I didn’t realise until then that unthinkable events happen all the time,” says Garai. “It was like a fracturing of your sense of the world being something that you can control, and a sudden understanding that it revolves on its own axis.” For Rose-Bremner, the baby of the company, it is the death of Amy Winehouse. She was just seven when it happened, “and everyone was so sad. It opened up a little tear in the innocence of childhood”.

McKee, who is 60 and grew up in a coalmining family in County Durham, is reluctant to play the game. “I’m always slightly cautious because I’m intrigued by how we use memory in order to validate our present, and that’s obviously something that Annie deals with as well. I’m interested in trying to be forensic about my memory, which is not easy,” she says. One definite memory is of the strikes in the 1970s, which led to the imposition of a three-day week, rubbish piling up in the streets and regular power cuts. “You know, having suddenly to sit with candles – I actually made candles,” she says. She considers herself fortunate to have been born when she was, when opportunities were starting to open up for bright working-class girls, “but really it’s all down to serendipity,” she says. “I happened to meet people at a very formative part of my life who helped me understand that I had choices. And although it wasn’t easy, and certainly there was no level playing field – still there isn’t, obviously – I did get this sort of validation. My spirit wasn’t exactly celebrated, but it wasn’t crushed either.”

This brings us to another of Ernaux’s big themes: social mobility. Neither Findlay nor McKee had any tradition of acting in their families. “It wasn’t part of our world at all,” says McKee, “but you could see things on TV – not a massive amount that was going to help in terms of female representation and independence. But there were just enough nuggets every now and then to make you think.” Inspired by the founders of a local drama workshop, she auditioned for a TV series and landed her first role in her teens, missing so much school that her teachers decided the best option was to pack her off to the National Youth Theatre in London. “So, very ignorantly, I applied,” she says. “I made up an audition piece because I didn’t have any plays to reference. I was just so green, but coming to London, meeting interesting people from all over the country with different experiences. All of these things just made me understand that I didn’t have a mono-future.”

There is a cost to moving up in the world, of which Ernaux herself is acutely aware. On visits home as a student to do her laundry, she writes, she “saw the family milleu from the outside as a closed world that was no longer ours”. Garai grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore, the daughter of a bank manager father whose Jewish family originated from Hungary, “so he was a sort of immigrant too”. Her mother’s family was different, she says, diplomatically. “She didn’t go to private school or anything like that, and was from an ordinary background, for want of a better word. But going to private school was like the summation of my entire family’s goals. It was deeply important for my parents for their children to be part of the middle class. And this is something in Annie Ernaux’s writings about her mother’s ambitions for her daughter that I really related to. Any time you make a tremendous effort to move your children into another class, then inevitably, you’re moving them further away from you. Even though she’s this woman from a small rural agricultural community in France, I feel like that’s a very universal experience.”

Mohindra grew up in Nottingham, the daughter of a mother from a poor background in India, who travelled to the UK at the age of 18 to marry her father, a clerical worker for the British army. “He had all this etiquette that he wanted us to have, like the way that we ate. And she was just as earthy as they come. You eat with your hands, you know, you sort of just crack on with things. And there was not really much time in our heads for how things were supposed to be done,” she says.

She, too, had no family history of engagement with the arts. “I felt I was doing a lot of things for the first time in my family, like reading and wanting to be part of the arts. And so, moving to London and being in certain spaces, I was, God, there are so many things I need to learn in terms of how you hold yourself, how you behave, how to have a conversation and be curious about other people. It feels like sometimes at home we communicate just to survive, as opposed to being able to really take an interest in, and nurture, one another. That seems like a class thing to me.”

Over the course of The Years, Ernaux goes from being a daughter to a grandmother, experiences that complicate her changing perspective on what it is to be a woman in the world. In her 20s she has a gruelling backstreet abortion, dramatically recalling the diminishment of young women who were, and still are in many parts of the world, denied autonomy over their bodies. “She would like to write about the miners’ strike, the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ and Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’; but all she can think about is that it has been eight weeks since her last period,” she writes.

Neither Findlay nor McKee have children. “All power to the women who have managed children and career,” says Findlay. “That’s an amazing achievement that I think now is not easier, necessarily, but more acceptable somehow in terms of childcare.” Garai’s perspective, as the mother of two, aged seven and 11, is rather different. “Being a parent,” she says, “used to be, like, just making sure they don’t die. And now it’s crazy what you’re expected to do, and the confluence of that with the massive expansion in the number of hours that people have to work in order to have a life and pay the rent. You know, it’s really hard for parents to sustain that. And I did. It’s an issue of feminism that a previous generation could not necessarily have predicted, because they couldn’t have imagined falling living standards and wage stagnation and also the explosion in parenting culture. And that’s something that really falls on women.”

Mohindra nods vigorously, saying: “The exposure to parenting culture is something I’ve really struggled with, because my mum was a jack of all trades, and genuinely a master of all of them. She has been a bank manager, a teaching assistant. She’s run a post office and a pub. And yet she raised three children and literally gave us everything. I see that and I go: ‘You did that? So I’m going to do it too.’ But then, with the parenting culture thing on top of that, it’s a lot.” She and her actor partner, Sacha Dhawan, haven’t yet taken the parenting plunge. “We really want to, but I’m kind of frozen by the idea of having to, as Romola said, compromise somewhere. I want to keep doing what I do. I love it and want to give it my all; at the same time I don’t want to be a bad parent. And there’s just so much shame around.”

Rose-Bremner, who is the daughter of Trainspotting actor Ewen Bremner and the actor turned drama teacher Marcia Rose, also has a strong maternal role model. After her parents split up and her father moved to the US, she stayed in Edinburgh with her mother. “And she was working all the time, you know. It never even crossed my mind that people of any gender couldn’t make whatever choice they want, and that I wouldn’t be my own breadwinner.”

Advances in technology are always at the front of Ernaux’s mind when she thinks about a woman’s lot, but the chronology of her own life story in The Years ends before the boom in social media, which has put a whole new pressure on both mothers and daughters. Where do these five women think this leaves the feminist project today? They all agree that feminism is too big and various a constituency to be summed up in a short interview. “But yeah, I don’t think it’s in a good place at the moment,” says Garai. “Once you’ve achieved goals on paper – you can have an abortion, you can vote, you are recognised in law as not being property of your husband – you lose a lot of the language, don’t you? How do we now talk about the kind of subtle ways in which women are disenfranchised? I think that does make it very difficult for younger women. I think social media is a poison that has got to the very core of the female experience, and has made being a woman almost intolerable for girls, and I feel terribly bad for them.”

Rose-Bremner is of a generation who grew up with Instagram, “getting sucked into it, and not even realising what it was. And then, as you get older, and form your own opinions of the world, you see that actually, what it is becoming is a place to influence people, a place for companies to mess with people’s minds. It’s so controlled by money, and the patriarchal mindset, and it’s just swallowing us all up, trying to advertise to us things that we don’t even need and make us look like people that we feel like we should be, which is the epitome of a woman. And once you can step outside of that it seems obvious, but if you’re going through it, you don’t even realise that you’re being brainwashed.”

One solution, says Mohindra, is to read widely. As part of a family in which her mother made all the decisions, she grew up assuming every family operated the same way. “Because I’m new to reading about feminism, I don’t know if intersectionality is a new thing. But I’m relieved it is starting to be part of the wider feminist narrative because I think for ages I felt like there were so many cut and dried ideas around it that didn’t take into account people’s culture, and the way they see religion, and other things that change the way women view themselves. I think we have to create space for people to have those nuances.”

It’s also helpful and fascinating to listen to intergenerational communities of women such as the cast of The Years. There’s a touching moment when I ask each of them to namecheck their formative roles. Findlay mentions Top Girls and Dusty Hughes’s play Commitments, later a BBC Play for Today in which she played a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang and worked with Alan Rickman and Richard Wilson. McKee cites Our Friends in the North and – in terms of the opportunities it generated – the role of Bella in the film Notting Hill. Garai chooses Ella Hickson’s gender identity classic The Writer, in which she took the title role at the Almeida in 2018. Mohindra picks the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures, in which she made her screen debut in her teens, as the schoolgirl investigator Rani Chandra.

Suddenly, tears are rolling down Rose-Bremner’s face. The four brief years of own career have had important autobiographical resonances for her, she says, including a role in the multi-authored NW Trilogy, at London’s Kiln theatre, as an angry teenager who reconnects with her estranged Windrush-generation father through their shared love of reggae music. But that is not why she is tearful. “I kind of got a bit emotional hearing you speak, because those roles that you mentioned were like growing up for me,” she says to Garai and Mohindra. As the mixed-race daughter of a Jamaican-born mother, the power of seeing a character as strong as Rani, “who was brown, but it wasn’t about that, really hit me when I was very young and didn’t even understand why I was so drawn to her”. As for The Writer: “Watching it was such a profound experience for me. It shifted my mindset. To be in a play with both of you…” There can be few activities more Ernaux-esque than considering the string of experiences and achievements that fly like brightly coloured bunting across an 80-year period of history, held aloft by seven talented and successful women – five actors, a writer, and the adapter-director who has brought them all together.

• The Years is at the Almeida theatre, London, 27 July-31 August