A pro-abortion play with graphic scenes is moving to London’s West End, which — along with Broadway in New York City — is largely considered the highest level of commercial theater in the English-speaking world.
Originally showing at the Almeida Theatre, a stage adaptation of Annie Ervaux’s book “The Years” has moved to the Harold Pinter Theatre after a sold-out run, and will be shown through April of 2025. The play brings one woman’s life story to the stage, beginning in post-war France and ending in the early 2000s. However, one portion of the play has received widespread attention: a graphic abortion scene that has allegedly caused many audience members to faint.
When the play originally opened last year at London’s Almeida Theater, the play was halted when numerous members of the audience needed assistance. Others allegedly shouted and complained that the scene was a “disgrace” and that they were given no warning of what they would see. The theater, however, maintains that its website included a content warning for the play, including that it featured a “graphic depiction of an abortion,” blood, sexual content, and a “coerced sexual encounter.”
Ernaux said in 2019 that including the abortion was based on her own life experience of underoing an illegal abortion herself. “There were thousands who had been through secret abortions; I wanted to recreate the truth of it exactly as it was in the moment, ridding myself of any knowledge of the fight for women’s rights that would follow,” she said. “Because in 1963, 1964 when it happened to me, it was unthinkable to imagine abortion would one day be authorised; doctors wouldn’t even say the word.”
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Actress Romola Garai says during the scene of her abortion that “this thing has no place in language,” and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett argues in the Guardian that the play will help bring more visibility to the supposed “need” for access to abortion. Oddly, what Cosslett wrote — while gleeful over the supposed promotion of abortion — shows exactly why the brutal scene could backfire for abortion advocates.
“Perhaps this is what is so shocking about ‘The Years’: could this be the first time that some audience members have actually really confronted what the reality of an abortion involves?” she wrote. “There are of course many men who will have accompanied their partners to and supported them through abortions, and who have needed support themselves. Yet one wonders how many others, in that moment Garai stands on stage, are imagining the experience in detail for the very first time in their lives. Such is the powerful quality of the writing and the performance.”
It’s true that many are unprepared for just what abortion truly entails; a recent study, for example, found that women said they were not prepared at all for how much pain they experienced during a chemical abortion. Legal or illegal, abortion is a brutal, violent, bloody act, and the reality of what it entails certainly may make members of the audience more sympathetic — but not necessarily more likely to walk away thinking that abortion is empowering or something to be celebrated.
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