The Years

• Other

by Annie Ernaux / directed by Jette Steckel

“Preserving things from times that are gone forever.” Annie Ernaux

With photographs and movie-reels, memories and notations, with words, jokes, sayings and advertising slogans, melodies, trends and furniture, with smells and objects, Annie Ernaux brings to life the years gone by. In this way, she inscribes life – our life, life itself – into a completely new form of narration, a kind of collective autobiography.

Her personal experience is intertwined with the shared memory and societal imprints of her generation. Radically subjective colorings take on a universal hue. The narrative encompasses a post-war childhood, a change of milieu from provincial petty bourgeoise to urban intellectual middle class, the struggle and its setbacks for emancipation and self-determination, starting a family, the uprisals of 1968, the advent of a consumer society – political developments, events and crises interwoven with private occurrences and reaching into the beginning of the 21^st century. Annie Ernaux is the opposite of a know-it-all. Within the larger context of societal change, she remains someone who is in search-mode, finding words for the passing of time in a multivocal time-current that sweeps us away.

Annie Ernaux, born 1940 in France, says she is an “ethnologist of herself”. She is one of the most important contemporary writers, with 20 novels that are acclaimed by critics and readers alike. In 2022, she received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Director Jette Steckel has put her mark on Thalia Theater with 17 productions since 2006. Her staging of “The Years” will involve a large ensemble.

Premiere 17th may 2025, Thalia Theater