Two faintings a night: Inside the West End's most shocking show

Telegraph

12-03-2025

It's a Thursday night outside the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End and a long line of people are queuing for the evening's performance of the smash hit play The Years, nominated for five Olivier awards. The atmosphere is charged with excitable apprehension. One young woman, in her early twenties, declaims 'abortion!' in a mock-dramatic way in front of her friends. Two older American men smile wryly. 'Let's see how many people are still standing by the end,' says one.
It's fair to say that not everyone was. As has now become a common occurrence with The Years, directed and adapted by Eline Arbo from the French writer Annie Ernaux's memoir Les Années, the performance was stopped after 45 minutes. An audience member had fallen ill during a scene in which Romola Garai, playing Annie 3 (the five-strong female cast play the same character at different stages of her life, from 1941 to 2006) endures a back street abortion. Garai plays Annie at the start of the 1960s, a time when medical abortions were still illegal in France; her character initially attempts in vain to abort the foetus herself using a knitting needle, then visits a back-street nurse and miscarries at home.
In this instance, the interruption occurred within seconds after Garai had described the procedure in detail and was lying on her back crying out in pain. In other performances, people have either fainted or requested to leave at the point when Garai stands up, smears blood over her legs and, in a breath-stilling moment, holds out her hands as though cupping the aborted foetus.
Someone has been affected during the majority of performances; The Guardian also reported that the majority of fainters are men, although the theatre says that's not the case. The ushers have been given additional training to deal with audience responses and the theatre has employed an on-site medic.
The scene is undeniably distressing, although it's also not especially graphic: one audience member described it to me as 'almost serene'. Yet many who have seen the show are questioning why it's having so great a physical impact so consistently. 'I don't understand why people who are squeamish are buying tickets,' muttered the woman sitting next to me. She was astonished that the show had stopped when it had. 'People have reacted before anything has happened.'
As is now standard, British audiences for The Years receive a trigger warning when they buy tickets online, in this instance alerting them to 'blood' and 'a graphic depiction of abortion'. There are also a few discreet warnings on posters in the foyers of the theatre. Yet when the production was performed in The Netherlands, there were no such warnings and very few faintings. 'My experience is that there's more reactions than if you don't have these,' Arbo told the Financial Times. 'It's the theatre's way of giving an excuse for itself, but then you [the audience] are so aware of it that it enhances the feeling of uncomfortableness.'
A 2023 study by the British Psychological Society found that not only did trigger warnings have 'a negligible impact on emotional reactions', but they were also more likely to prompt in people 'an anticipatory response'. 'I felt I was being primed to react,' one woman told me after the show. 'I kept wondering 'which actress is it going to be?' In some ways it took away from the story.'
Everyone I spoke to for this piece defended trigger warnings as a necessary protection for those who need them; Arbo also defends them. Yet some people choose to ignore them. One man who saw it in the West End had no idea the show was routinely stopped and had not looked at the trigger warnings. When it happened he initially assumed someone had been taken ill for an entirely different reason. 'I had no anxiety about the scene and no visceral reaction,' he says. Does he have a view on why other men might be more affected? 'I can only speculate but it might be that some men might never have had the chance before to realise what [an abortion] means for women.'
It's certainly still rare to see women's gynaecological experience both dramatised and emphasised in the way it is in The Years. 'We are very unused to seeing uterine blood within our culture,' argues another woman who also saw the production in the West End. 'It wasn't so long ago [in 2017] that sanitary towel manufacturers started using red liquid instead of blue in their adverts.' Abortions and periods, she says, remain a cultural taboo.
Fainting is hardly a new phenomenon in theatre – audiences passed out in their droves at the Globe's blood splattered 2012 Titus Andronicus and, more recently during the West End production of A Little Life. Fainting is also good for business: during the 19th century, Grand Guignol theatres in Paris would put out the rumour that people were regularly passing out at shows, which in turn helped bring people in.
Yet The Years doesn't fit easily into the standard spectacles of blood, gore and violence that tend to tip audiences over the edge. By any reasonable standard the amount of blood on view is relatively minor. Many of the people I spoke to mentioned they had seen far more gruesome events in other productions, in particular the West End production of A Little Life. 'That was far harder to watch because the violence in that wasn't self inflicted,' said one woman.
What's more, in 2022, the Almeida staged Beth Steele's working-class family epic The House of Shades, which featured an excruciating abortion in which Anne-Marie Duff's character Constance coercively took a coat hanger to her late-term pregnant daughter Laura (Emma Shipp). The scene included a cry from the aborted foetus which Constance had stuffed in a bucket – I watched it in horror and have never forgotten it. The production had standard trigger warnings. A spokesperson for the Almeida confirms that there were no reported faintings.
Compare this to The Years which has got to the point where audience expectation has become built into the experience of watching it. 'It's as though audiences see the scene beginning and their expectation [of what's about to take place] pushes them over the edge rather than anything they actually see,' said an English teacher. 'To be honest it reminded me of the Crucible,' she adds, referring to the Arthur Miller play about the 17th-century Salem witch trials in which a group of young girls become possessed by a form of mob hysteria.
Professor Simon Wessely, a consultant psychiatrist at King's College Hospital, points out that there is a distinction between mass hysteria, now known as 'mass sociogenic illness', and 'collective behaviour'. 'MSI is contagious and spreads, whereas collective behaviour tends to be something that might be anticipated, and indeed expected..by the audience, exactly as can happen in a charismatic church, for instance,' he says. 'To the uninitiated it can look very frightening, but actually isn't at all, and in the end both the person who has experienced the abnormal behaviour and the congregation feel better for the experience.' This, of course, is not so dissimilar to the cathartic purpose of ancient Greek tragedy which set out to 'arouse terror and pity' in audiences as a means of purging such emotions.
Except that many audience members have found the disruption to The Years annoying. 'Are people going now because of the sensationalism of it and if so, is that detracting from what, for many women in the US, in light of the overturning of abortion rights, is now their lived experience?' says one woman.
Others have even wondered if the fainters are plants. One woman also questioned whether ushers have become too quick to respond to the smallest audience reaction. A spokesperson for the Harold Pinter Theatre denies that this is the case, and tells me the faintings are 'starting to slow down, with more productions taking place without incident.'
Of course, no one can account for the subjective reaction of any given audience – many women will have experienced abortion or miscarriage; either are experiences that tend to be discussed much in public. 'I never think about my ectopic [pregnancy], but watching that scene brought it back,' one woman told me. She didn't feel faint but can understand why plenty might. 'The scene is about profound loss. [But on the other hand], peoples' responses to their own experiences and to those of others aren't always logical.'