If you have two hours to spare, spend it anywhere but here: The Years reviewed

The Years is a monologue spoken by a handful of actresses, some young, some old enough to carry bus passes. They stand in black costumes on a white stage explaining to us the significance of memory, history and feelings. Then the story begins.

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The narrator is a precocious chatterbox born in France during the war who has no aim in life other than sensual gratification. She’s not a human being, just a cluster of nerves, like a taste bud, that registers nice or nasty, sweet or bitter. And that’s it. She has no morality. She doesn’t develop personally because her nature isn’t capable of emotional growth. Yet the audience is expected to admire everything she says about her experiences.

Sex is her obsession. As a teen, she brings herself to orgasm on the corner of a table. Later she buffs herself vigorously with a sock. At summer camp, she has sex on a bench with a boy she met 60 seconds earlier. Their pornographic intimacies are mimed in full. They start in the missionary position and they proceed to oral sex. His climax is replicated on stage for our enjoyment.

At university, a casual fling leads to a pregnancy that she tries to terminate with two knitting needles. This fails. So she hires a retired nurse to execute the child inside her womb. The baby’s due date, July 1964, is mentioned in the script. Plenty of people in the audience were born during the 1960s so this aborted foetus could have been any of us. Luckily our parents weren’t child killers. The actress uses lashings of ketchup as she mimes pulling the dead child out of her birth canal.