Old Times

Like much of the late Pinter’s work, Old Times is a study in power dynamics disguised as an epistemological investigation. Into the apparently staid middle-aged marriage of Deeley (Sandys) and Kate (McKnight) drops Kate’s long-lost roommate Anna (Gillum). The questions about Anna start small: Is she a vegetarian? Does she have a husband? But as the play develops, small knots in the fabric of Deeley and Kate’s past get teased out until they grow into perilous rents. Who was the man who laid his head in Kate’s lap? Did Deeley really spend a pub evening staring up Anna’s skirt? And who ran across Kate one fateful night at a screening of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out? These questions underpin strategic games among the trio that become ever more intense, however obscure their ultimate significance. Like the figures of Francis Bacon, Pinter’s characters exist in a state of extremity, the author’s characteristic silences only emphasizing their rage and suffering.

Remy Bumppo delivers a smart and subtle version of Pinter’s play. Sandys locates the snarling will to domination underneath Deeley’s sour wit, while Gillum is at once ingenuous and insinuating. Together they transform standard songs such as “You Can’t Take That Away from Me” into minor masterpieces of threat and oblique longing. Bohnen’s production also, happily, plays up the dark humor in Pinter’s fraught exchanges. While wandering accents and a slight tendency to melodrama blunt the second act somewhat, this remains a deftly executed staging of a haunting and difficult classic.

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