Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Eline Arbo’s London debut proved both a triumph and a nightmare. The Norwegian director’s critically acclaimed show The Years sold out its original English-language run at the Almeida Theatre last summer. Now she is back in London, visiting from her Dutch base as artistic director of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, for a deserved West End transfer. The Years is an adaptation of the feminist autofiction of French writer Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in 2022. It takes its name from Ernaux’s bestselling memoir, written in the collective “we”, of a generation of women living through the rise of French consumer society. Arbo’s adaptation also works in material from Ernaux’s more graphic writings elsewhere about abortion, sexual coercion and what Arbo calls “this bodily experience” of female sexual subjectivity, “this heartbreaking need to be desired”. Five actresses take on the role of Annie at different stages of life.On press night, the critics raved. Arbo’s production has the alchemy that can only sizzle when an innovative director wins the trust of a veteran cast: marquee-name actresses Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai and Gina McKee had never seemed so playful.But a few nights later, chaos hit. A scene depicting a backstreet abortion in 1963, taken from Ernaux’s Happening, was the cause. There were fainting fits, walkouts, and even a one-man protest (“his wife and daughter tried to silence him,” Arbo says). It became a nightly stop-start affair, with Garai leaving the stage for 15 minutes at a time to allow theatre ushers to tend to the fainters.The actress has previously suggested that these disruptions “help me connect with the audience . . . after that person’s had to be carried out, the audience and myself are like ‘OK, let’s carry on, and tell the rest of this story,’ and it can feel more communal because of that.” Arbo clearly feels differently: “Every night I was praying, ‘Please let them just be able to play it through.’ We made this play without an intermission. It’s supposed to be felt as one swoop.”When I meet Arbo, she’s about to watch the first full rehearsal run in the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre. Consciously or unconsciously, I’ve dressed to a stock fantasy of attire for meeting a cult Norwegian theatre director; I’ve clearly got it right, because Arbo arrives in an identical outfit. We shake hands, in our black turtlenecks, black belted trousers, layered jewellery and long black coats against the London rain.Born in the Arctic Circle city of Tromsø — which sees no sunlight in December, nor darkness in June — Arbo arrived in Amsterdam in 2012 to join the directing course at the prestigious Academy of Theatre and Dance. She spoke no Dutch. “I did my auditions in English. Then I started in September 2012 and at that point they said, ‘After Christmas, you have to speak only Dutch.’ So I took a two-week intensive course . . . and then you just have to do it.”Twelve years on from that Christmas, Arbo holds one of the most powerful positions in Dutch theatre. She also sits at the centre of a network of polyglot, European theatremakers. Her predecessor Ivo van Hove used the ITA as a global base from which he won a Tony Award on Broadway and an Olivier Award in London; Arbo so far has maintained her more continental focus. Arbo is clearly still struggling with the norms of commercial transfers in British theatre: “You would not take a subsidised production into a commercial venue in the Netherlands. We have commercial venues, but those are exclusively for musicals. Perhaps cabaret.” Were European countries to reduce their generous theatre subsidies to British levels, “I think the consequence could be that there’s no real artistic experiment any more.” Has she softened anything for the West End run? “I’ve not made any changes. No.”The hysteria of the British reaction surprised Arbo, because no such phenomenon occurred when her Dutch-language version premiered at The Hague in 2022. (Almeida artistic director Rupert Goold saw the production in Europe, fell in love with it, and invited her to restage it with a British cast.) One difference was the role of “trigger warnings” in heightening the anticipation of the audience: posters with warnings about the depiction of abortion were plastered all over the Almeida, whereas there were none in The Hague. “My experience is that there’s more reactions than if you don’t have these,” Arbo says cautiously. “It’s the theatre’s way of giving an excuse for itself, but then you [the audience] are so aware of it that it enhances the feeling of uncomfortableness.”Trigger warnings are a contentious subject, and Arbo is keen to affirm that she understands the reasons for their use: “I would never want people to come and be unprepared, and then have to go through a traumatic experience again because of my work.” But she also cites, with concern, a session with directing students who suggested she should have cut the abortion sequence completely, “because it can affect people.” These are the attitudes, Arbo suggests, “which make me afraid we will make everything very vanilla”.The Years is anything but vanilla: not least in its depictions of teenage masturbation and menopausal sexuality. There’s a nudge-nudge wink-wink humour to it, which one rare dissenting critic criticised as more British than French in its approach. Arbo defends the show’s humour: “If I see something and it’s only gloomy and dark, I need a lightness. And humans do giggle a lot about this stuff.” There is giggling galore as we watch the teenage version of Annie learn to masturbate, extensively, with the aid of furniture. “She is alone, but not alone at all,” Arbo notes, because her older selves gather to observe the memory with a mix of shame and excitement. The abortion sequence, however, remains the clearest distillation of Arbo’s political project. As in Ernaux’s writing, the scene doesn’t shy away from the vulnerability of the foetus, nor the reasons for pro-life revulsion. But Arbo is clearly committed to reproductive rights at a time when they are under threat in America; and to broader feminist solidarity at a time of global populist backlash.Even the Netherlands, currently ranked third among EU member states in the alliance’s Gender Equality Index, felt retrograde when she moved from egalitarian Norway. (“The Netherlands is a country that has never had a female prime minister, so many key roles that have never been filled by a woman.”) She is despairing about the number of women working part-time, “which of course has an effect on leadership roles”, the cost of childcare, the pressure to conform to “male models of leadership” within theatre. Can theatre change these things? “Of course.”To April 19, haroldpintertheatre.co.uk
