Thoughts on - Old Times

I have a college pal with whom I share a love of most of the British actors and actresses working today.  I think it's from watching too much BBC tv in the box office of our school.  So whenever any of them are announced for productions, off we go.  Together, we've seen Ralph Fiennes in Richard II, Alan Rickman in Private Lives, Derek Jacobi in Uncle Vanya, Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull, and Kenneth Branagh in Macbeth.  I'm sure there are more, those are just the shows that popped into my head just now.  Therefore, when the ads for Clive Owen in Harold Pinter's Old Times crossed our e-mailboxes, we were in.  We both had a last-minute opening in our schedules last night, so we used a discount code for seats in the last row of the mezzanine.  The show doesn't open until next week, so I'll only offer a few thoughts.

I have to say I'm no expert on Pinter, I've only seen The Homecoming performed live, though I have read several other of his plays.  And I think having only a passing acquaintance with Pinter and his oeuvre didn't help me all that much last night.  I was pretty much confused the entire evening by Old Times, though I was certainly never bored.  Or, rather, I think I know what the play was about, but the production confused me.  I think.

A surreal memory play, Old Times begins with Deeley and Kate, a longtime married couple, awaiting the arrival of Kate's college friend, Anna.  What follows is a cat-and-mouse game of ownership and sexual conquest.  You're never quite sure if what anyone is saying is true, at any given moment, but there is such a charged atmosphere hovering over everything.  You're constantly waiting for something terrible to happen, and it does, but not in the way that you've been fearing.

photo credit: Joan Marcus

Kelly Reilly is fantastic as the enigmatic Kate - you can see why both Anna and Deeley are so fascinated by her and why they want to possess her.  She's so stunning and still; you're just projecting yourself onto every look and smile she gives you.  And when she lets loose at the end, wow.  So powerful.  Eve Best, who I adored in The Homecoming, is equally fine as Anna.  At first, you feel as if she's just showing off, but then you can see how she's trying to get under the skin of Deeley, as if she's trying to show him that she had Kate first.  And the way she wraps all of the stories together is amazing.  You can always see her mind moving, and how she arranges herself for maximum impact.  Loved her.  And Clive Owen was also terrific.  Deeley seems as if it could be a very difficult role - he should be charming, so you can see why Kate has stayed with him, but he should also be menacing during his confrontations with Anna, and also quite weak.  Weakness is often a difficult thing to portray and he does it brilliantly.  They all seem to be playing off each other quite well and are very in tune with the rhythms and silences in Pinter's writing.

I often get inside my head too much during a play that has so much delicious, poetic dialogue, so maybe that prodded my confusions.  But I loved every time Deeley picked out a word from one of Anna's sentences to ridicule her with, and then later on, he would use those same words to throw back in her face.  I was also quite taken with the line (paraphrased) "There are some things one remembers, even though they may never have happened."  That's just so fantastic, right? 

photo credit: Joan Marcus

But I really think my confusion stems from the set design and original music used throughout.  Instead of a room, we're sort of floating in space, on a turntable that ever so slightly revolves throughout.  The backdrop changes from stars to odd stripes, and the flooring has circular diagrams on it that seem to indicate a whirlpool of some sort.  Now, there is dialogue about ripples in water and how the ripples disappear, but to have a literal translation of that on a surreal set seems a bit much to me.  Oh, and there's a huge block of ice.  For me, some of the fun of a surreal play is to see the surreal quality juxtaposed with the naturalistic quality of real life.  So to have this weird set and vaguely ominous music just tipped the scale of the play for me.  There wasn't anything in the play for me to discover necessarily, the set and music (and lights, too, I guess) were doing it for me.  So I think that confused me.  I think.

photo credit: Joan Marcus

All in all, though, I'm glad I saw Old Times and, in fact, I would be game for seeing it again.  Maybe the set doesn't look so strange from the orchestra-level (we were in the last row of the mezzanine, remember).  And since it's only about 80 minutes long, no intermission, it certainly wouldn't be a waste of my time to see those three fine actors speaking those amazing Pinter words, now would it?  And maybe my memory could be toyed with and I wouldn't remember what was true or not if I saw it again.  That would be very Pinteresque, I think.