The Years Tickets

The stage manager appears from the wings and the performance is stopped. We’re a third of the way into this beautifully tender and quietly profound production. But it is too much for some.

This interruption has happened more than once during The Years run, both on the West End and at the Almeida’s sold-out season. A quiet murmur of concern ripples through the theatre, audience members shift in their seats as one person grows faint and others feel too unwell to continue watching. The scene in question is not a spectacle of horror, not a gratuitous display of pain - something audiences at the Harold Pinter Theatre are used to seeing in the last few years - but rather something far more unsettling: a woman, alone in her home, undergoing the final stage of abortion without access to proper medical care. There is no dramatic score, no exaggerated cries, no buckets of blood. Instead, there is quiet sadness, and the weight of isolation as she narrates one of the most painful moments of her life. Her unbearable reality of being left to suffer without help.

And yet, here in the theatre, help arrives swiftly. Ushers move with practiced precision to assist those who are overwhelmed, offering the very care that the woman on stage is denied. The irony is inescapable. The audience is physically distressed by the mere act of witnessing what so many have had to endure in real life, yet the woman at the heart of this story has no such relief, no one rushing in to ease her pain. There is no sympathy to be given afterwards, just judgement and disgust.  

The staging of this moment is delicate, handled with an emotional precision that refuses to turn it into spectacle. It is not a grotesque display but a devastatingly human one, a moment that lingers not because of what is seen, but because of what is felt. And if it is too much for some to bear, perhaps that only proves its necessity.