Old Times (tour)
Harold Pinter’s 1971 play remains a puzzle even when you work out that Deeley the filmmaker and his wife Kate are unsettled by the arrival of Kate’s old friend Anna who might or might not be dead. Best enjoyed as a three-way contest for affection, Old Times also operates as an intriguing memory play where someone’s version of past events will vary according to present needs in that battle for possession.
Peter Hall directed the premiere for the Royal Shakespeare Company and, although his touring production for the Theatre Royal Bath is a well observed musical composition, it is somehow lighter and less insinuating than either his own first version or indeed many subsequent productions. It’s not a good idea, in the first place, to have the acting area surrounded by a cylindrical scrim on which is projected, as the audience take their seats, a nebulous vista of waves and sky, a disastrously literal statement about the shimmering, deliquescent quality of the play.
Similarly, each act is prefaced by an ill-executed silhouette which seems to exert a deadening stranglehold on the subsequent action. The lighting of the usually reliable Peter Mumford is (or was at Richmond) a disgrace, with ugly patches and shadows cast in the final scenes by the visible lamps at the side of the stage and above the setting.
Neil Pearson as Deeley may not have the monumental savagery of Colin Blakely or Michael Gambon in the role, but he does have a perfect command of Pinter’s idiom and clipped phraseology. “Gaze” is not a word you hear much these days, he tells Anna (Susannah Harker), later recalling how he nonetheless “gazed” at her fixedly in the Wayfarers’ pub one evening, indeed “gazed” at her thighs, too, and her underwear which, it turns out, she may have stolen from Kate.
This conversation occurs in the second act bedroom while Kate (Janie Dee) is having her bath offstage. I recall Pinter once angrily putting a stop to an Italian production of the play in which a naked Kate was buffed and powdered by the other two after her ablutions; I’m afraid the rather tentative sensuality of Dee and Harker – the latter’s ample upper thighs are deliberately displayed through slits in her black skirt – made me long for a more explicit expression of the play’s lurking sensuality.
Dee and Harker play over-reverent piety, the one animating her speeches with her trademark twinkling brightness, the other adopting soignée attitudes as if informed that, in Pinter, she should be posing rather than pausing. Pearson continuously cuts through their respective emotional twittering, but suffers the fate of exclusion, as the play is partly about the longer-standing friendship of Kate and Anna, once out on the bohemian razzle in London when they were secretaries.
The famous exchange of romantic lyrics between Deeley and Anna is slightly hampered by wayward musical intonations, but Pearson is spot on with his memories of the Edgware Road gang of philosophers, and Janie Dee dispenses her final aria of remembering Kate dead with a fixating rapture. Old Times is a strange, beguiling trance of a play but its language is exact, flinty, funny. Hall knows his Pinter better than anyone; the detail is fine, the overall execution a little flimsy and half-cock.
– Michael Coveney
