Old Times

Synopsis

Deeley and Kate's frosty but well-ordered relationship is pushed to the brink of destruction with the arrival for dinner of Anna - Kate's friend of twenty years ago. Nostalgia can be a dangerous game, and what begins as a sport of harmless after-dinner reminiscence and flirtation rapidly turns into a terrfying psychological sparring-match of control and submission. Dazzling wordplay and deadpan humour propel events towards a shattering climax. Funny, sophisticated and downright disturbing, Old Times is one of the most theatrically elegant works from the pen of 'our greatest living playwright'.

Our Review:

8 July 2004

Premiered in 1971, Harold Pinter’s Old Times now re-appears at the Donmar Warehouse with all the fractured, fragmentary qualities of a dream that you can only recall brief snatches of. That’s partly the experience of seeing such a cryptic, elliptical play again, but mainly in the play itself that daringly (and sometimes dizzyingly) keeps going in and out of focus, looping in on itself and out again in a style we have come to know as positively Pinteresque.

That otherworldliness is underlined in Roger Michell’s new production, designed by William Dudley, with the action entirely unfolding behind a gauze screen that wraps the stage on all three sides, and mirrored surfaces on the floor and translucent surfaces along the back wall that create multiple reflections of the characters, their constantly fluctuating moods and measured movements.

Such a mirror up to nature, or at least behaviour, was only recently similarly held up scenically on stage in th...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (193.108.78.10) - 20 August 2004:

I seperated Old Times into equal thirds. The first was confusion, the second was a loss of all feeling in my frontal lobe and the third was spent thinking how much I really enjoyed the Night Season at the NT last week. Only see Old Times if you really need some quite time to sit and think, the mesh screen helps you pretty much ignore what is going on on stage. Or you could go and see the Night Season at the NT which is quite possibly the best and most complete plays I have ever seen - Oliviers all round there! ...

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