In ‘The Years,’ an Abortion Scene Is Causing Audience Members to Pass Out

About 40 minutes into a recent performance of “The Years” in London, Stephanie Schwartz suddenly felt ill and had to put her head between her legs.

Onstage at the Harold Pinter Theater, the actress Romola Garai was holding two knitting needles while portraying a young Frenchwoman trying to give herself an abortion. The scene was set in 1964, a time when medical abortions were illegal in France, and Garai’s character wasn’t ready for motherhood.

Schwartz, 39, said she had started feeling faint as Garai’s character, Annie, described her attempt to carry out the procedure in stark, if brief, detail. But then, Schwartz recalled, there was a commotion in the balcony above. An audience member had actually passed out.

Since opening last summer for a short run at the Almeida Theater, then again last month on the West End, “The Years” has been the talk of London’s theaterland. That has as much to do with audience reactions to the six-minute abortion scene as the near-universal critical acclaim that the production and its five actresses received for their powerful portrayal of one woman’s life.

While fainting theatergoers are nothing new — several passed out over the onstage torture in Sarah Kane’s “Cleansed” at the National Theater almost a decade ago — the sheer number keeling over at “The Years” stands out. Sonia Friedman, the show’s producer, said that at least one person has fainted at every performance despite a warning to ticketholders.

Friedman said that she realized the scene’s power, especially at a time when many women, particularly in the United States, fear a rollback of reproductive rights. After failing to carry out the home abortion, Annie describes her visit to a backstreet clinic, then, later, miscarrying the fetus at home. Still, Friedman said she worried that the scene had overtaken discussion about a play that portrayed women’s lives in all their “power, pain and joy.”

“What should dominate the discussion,” Friedman said, “is, ‘Why has it taken this long for such a work about women, by women, to be onstage?’”

Based on a 2008 autobiographical book of the same title by Annie Ernaux, the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, “The Years” is an attempt to not just capture a woman’s life, but also show France’s shift toward sexual liberation and consumerism.

Eline Arbo, the play’s director, said that, when she read the book, she immediately wanted to bring its blend of emotional, political and social history to the stage, even if Ernaux’s writing contained no dialogue. “Everybody thought I was crazy,” Arbo said.

She didn’t think twice about including the abortion scene. It was such a key moment in Ernaux’s life, Arbo said (Ernaux almost bled to death), adding that it was vital to remind audiences of the importance of legal abortion.

Garai said she performed the abortion scene when she auditioned for the show, and had felt it was a “great, accurate depiction” of something that many women experienced when abortion was illegal. “It’s their bodies, their histories,” Garai said.

During rehearsals, Garai recalled Arbo mentioning that a handful of audience members had fainted when the director staged the show in the Netherlands. But Garai said she had dismissed the possibility of similar reactions in London. British theatergoers, Garai recalled thinking, were used to sitting through bloody productions of Shakespeare.

Yet, two days after the play opened at the Almeida Theater, the stage manager rushed onstage mid-performance and stopped the show. Someone had fainted.

The cast feared they had traumatized a woman who had experienced an abortion, but it soon became clear there was no pattern: Men were fainting, as well as women.

Perhaps the summer heat was a contributing factor? But now that the play was running on the West End, during a bitterly cold winter, the fainting was “even worse,” Garai said. (The run concludes April 19.)

Arbo said that her best theory for the reactions was that the show’s stripped-back style left room for audiences to imagine the abortion themselves, and so increased the scene’s intensity. Really, though, she said, she had no idea why West End audiences were fainting. “Do you have an answer?” she asked. “I don’t!”

During a recent performance, the show, meant to run almost two hours without intermission, was stopped twice for about five minutes so that ushers could attend to flustered theatergoers. Other audience members said they had mixed feelings about those interruptions. Mary Tyler, 65, a retired management consultant, sighed when the play was first halted. “You are joking,” she said. “That is so rude to the performers.”

When the play stopped a second time, Chi Ufodiama, 35, a public relations worker, said she was sympathetic if someone who had experienced abortion was struggling, but she was “suspicious” that the pauses were a deliberate part of the show. (Garai dismissed that notion: “Why would we do that?”)

During each pause, Garai walked to the back of the stage and formed a circle with the other four woman playing Annie at different points in her life: Anjli Mohindra, Harmony Rose-Bremner, Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay. Garai said the cast had decided to remain onstage partly to signal to the audience that the play was about women’s communal experience. “We’re all here to tell the rest of this story together,” she said.

Once ushers had ensured the audience member was all right (they sometimes provide bottles of water or medical assistance), Garai returned to the front of the stage and continued acting as intensely as before, without missing a word. It was no different than having a director interrupting her mid-rehearsal, Garai said.

Within minutes of enduring the abortion, her character had moved on from that moment: She gets married, becomes a mother, and soon the play was racing through a divorce and other scenes that shed light on women’s lives. Some were comedic, like a moment when McKee, playing Annie in middle age, attends her first aerobics class. Other scenes were more passionate, including one in which Findlay, portraying Annie in her 50s and 60s, describes an affair with a younger man.

For Garai, that May-December romance was as strong a statement as the abortion. Garai said it showed that older women “not only can desire, but can be objects of desire,” adding she had never seen such a relationship on a London stage before.

Even for Schwartz, the audience member who felt she came close to fainting, the play’s broader messages struck home. She said certain moments made her ponder what past generations of women lived through, as well as reflect on her own life experiences and those of her friends.

The play was “such a relatable depiction of womanhood,” Schwartz added, and that meant it had to include the abortion scene, too.