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Following a sold-out run at the Almeida theatre, this month The Years – a stage adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s choral novel of 21st-century womanhood – transfers to the West End. The play became somewhat notorious because of the impact that its abortion scene was having on audience members. In the scene, a bloodied Romola Garai recounts passing a dead foetus after an illegal backstreet abortion, a performance our theatre critic described as “devastating”. A preview last summer had to be stopped as several audience members requested medical assistance, while another shouted at the cast that the scene had been “a disgrace” and protested that “there was no warning” (content notes were, in fact, provided).
As I wrote in the autumn, I had assumed these fainters were women, triggered by the trauma of past experiences, but that was sexist of me. It was in fact mostly men who were passing out, and a man who yelled at the cast. No one fainted when I saw the play, but someone did leave, and another audience member, head in hands, looked distinctly green about the gills. As the play opens to even larger audiences and more exposure, it will be interesting to see if the faintings – and the headlines – continue, or if staging the play in a less intimate theatre changes the scene’s impact.
Personally, I have a feeling we’ll see more swooning men before the run is out. I think the reaction goes beyond simple haemophobia. In the scene, Garai’s character says of the procedure: “This thing has no place in language”, making explicit Ernaux’s artistic endeavour to create precisely that: a language of abortion. She set out to bring light to a subject that for so long had been considered a hidden, private “women’s problem” cloaked in silence and shame. It is in her short work Happening, her account of her own backstreet abortion, that she approached this linguistic and artistic vacuum, and it is from this short, autobiographical piece of writing, rather than from The Years, that the scene has been taken. In Happening, Ernaux writes: “I don’t believe there is a single museum in the world whose collections feature a work called The Abortionist’s Studio.”
Is it because of this vacuum, this absence of depiction and therefore exposure, that men are fainting in their seats? Historically, artistically, they have not been encouraged to put themselves in our shoes, to conceptualise and empathise with living in a female body – or the work that has attempted to do so has been marginalised and mocked. Throughout the 20th century, pioneering female artists have attempted to translate their bodily experience into art, from Frida Kahlo – who wanted to draw her baby’s body after her miscarriage but had to make do with medical drawings – to Paula Rego and Tracey Emin, whose film How it Feels recounts her own traumatic abortion. Getting to the point we are at now has been the work of decades. That an experience that is the lived reality of millions of women should still, in 2024, have such a visceral effect on some men speaks volumes.
But then I have long suspected that not all men have theory of mind when the subject is female. Watching Killers of the Flower Moon recently, I found myself marvelling at how one of the leading figures, Mollie, has a child (and eventually more than one) who seemingly appears from nowhere. “Wait, what?” I said. “When did she give birth?” I love Scorsese as much as anyone else, but this film is three hours and 26 minutes long, and yet this highly significant bodily event barely registers. Why? I’m left wondering if it’s because Scorsese, like so many male creators, simply just didn’t think about childbirth, or how it must have felt for a Native American woman in the 1920s, in any real depth.
Perhaps this is what is so shocking about The Years: could this be the first time that some audience members have actually really confronted what the reality of an abortion involves? There are of course many men who will have accompanied their partners to and supported them through abortions, and who have needed support themselves. Yet one wonders how many others, in that moment Garai stands on stage, are imagining the experience in detail for the very first time in their lives. Such is the powerful quality of the writing and the performance.
In this current moment, such work is explicitly political. Moreover, in decrying this absence, Ernaux has created something of a chain reaction. Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire has a scene that is a direct response to Ernaux’s statement about painting, the film Saint Frances was another nuanced depiction and Happening was turned into a film. Across poetry, prose and visual art there is also more and more exploration of the theme of abortion, and of the experience of living in a female body more generally. That’s already far more light being let in than when those in my generation were teenagers. Girls I knew were having abortions – and describing them to each other. I was 13 when I first heard a girl talk about what Garai talks about on stage – but on television there was little beyond Vera Drake. Sex education was rudimentary and came far too late, and period blood in advertisements was still blue. As one comment piece in response to the play argued, women play a part, too, in hiding their blood from their partners and sons.
It’s not just about seeing it, though, it’s about being made to feel it. If that feels shocking, or even disgraceful, then it’s probably high time it happened.
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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
