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.

Kristin Scott Thomas, who won a Whatsonstage.com Award for As You Desire Me in 2006, and Lia Williams will reunite having collaborated on a revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal at the same venue last year. The play will also star Olivier Award winning Rufus Sewell

Funny, sophisticated and downright disturbing, Old Times is one of the most theatrically elegant works from the pen of 'our greatest living playwright'.

Directed by Ian Rickson, this will be the first Pinter play to be staged at the venue since it was renamed in the Nobel Prize-winning playwright's honour last year, so book your tickets now!

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 1 February 2013

Forty years after its premiere, Harold Pinter's Old Times - the first Pinter play to be presented in the new Harold Pinter theatre (formerly the Comedy) - still hasn't yielded up all of its mysteries: "A work of beautiful elegiac obliquity," said Michael Billington in his definitive Pinter biography.

But it's also a particular kind of memory play about the 1940s, its social contracts and fissures, its music and mores and metropolitan moodiness, its new sexual camaraderie. And it's not so much a whodunnit as a "what happened," and can we be sure?

Ian Rickson's production is played fast and true, and without an interval,  pressing all the right buttons and a few unexpected ones, with a delightful potpourri of period songs, references to Carol Reed's film noir Odd Man Out and curious comic mis-emphases: "You have a wonderful casserole... I mean, wife."

The play's love trio ar...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 28 February 2013:

A future generation might re-evaluate Pinter and conclude that he was a pretentious and overrated writer whose plays were deliberately obscureto hide the fact that they did not make any sense to anyone ut him and were filled with characters who would never exist in real life. People much cleverer than me have tried to decipher posible explanations for Old Times but as Pinter could not even be bothered to offer any guidance to his cast or directors I don't see why I should bother any more with a writer who seemed to have such disdain for his audience....

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