Old Times – Program Notes

In 1971 I was two years out of college and clueless as to what to do in life. After a succession of menial and meaningless jobs, the best of which was peddling cheap shirts in a store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I accepted my parents’ offer to visit them in Sydney, Australia. My father had been sent there by the New York bank he worked for. It was a plum assignment and it allowed my folks to live rather lavishly for a few years in that big, beautiful city by the southern sea.

The month I was supposed to spend there turned into close to a year. I wasted my time writing puerile, self-piteous poetry—try to imagine, at your imagination’s perile, a cross-fertilization of Ezra Pound and Rod McKuen—as well as a play that, charitably speaking, hadn’t a coherent or original thought in its empty little head. My social life consisted of hanging out with (or hanging on to) the well-off sons and daughters of my father’s business associates, playing golf, drinking immense bottles of the local lager, and being the sole individual under the age of twenty-five not participating in the sexual revolution that was raging all around.

Without question, however, this misadventure in the Antipodes was made worthwhile by a single event: attending a production of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at Sydney’s Old Tote Theatre that was a marvel of staging, design and ensemble acting, with a performance in the title role by a magnificent Australian actor named John Bell that continues to hold a lofty place in my memory. It was enough to restore a belief in the art of the theatre that my abomination of a play had all but eviscerated.

This state of affairs was further amplified when in December of that year I made my circuitous way to London for the first time where another series of transformative theatrical experiences awaited me: Jonathan Miller’s epic rendering of Danton’s Death at the National Theatre with Christopher Plummer in the title role and an extraordinary Long Day’s Journey Into Night with no less than Laurence Olivier as the elder Tyrone. (Both of these shows were stolen, by the way, not by the illustrious Messrs. Plummer and Olivier but by a young actor new to me, Ronald Pickup, still active now at age 72.)

In that same week,  I also saw the original production of Pinter’s Old Times directed by Peter Hall for the RSC. The sublime cast consisted of Colin Blakely as Deeley, Dorothy Tutin as Kate and Vivien Merchant (then Mrs. Harold Pinter) as Anna.

If I needed any further proof that Pinter was my favorite contemporary playwright—and I probably didn’t—this production unequivocally confirmed as much. Peter Hall’s direction was a marvel of clarity, economy and understated eloquence; the same could be said of the performances of all three actors. It had to be thus for the play to have made the striking impression it did.  Old Times, for all its considerable wit, beguiling language and deceptive air of nostalgia, can be quite bewildering at times. Maddeningly so, it has been said. (Not by me, of course.)

It was Pinter’s first full-length play since The Homecoming appeared in 1965, and the shorter works that came between—Landscape, Silence, and Night—found Pinter in experimental mode, playing with dislocations of time and space, the contradictions of their characters’ recollections of events, the unreliability of memory itself. All of these fascinations came to fuller flower in Old Times, albeit articulated in what appeared to be a more “conventional” context: the archetypal appearance of a visitor from the past arriving unexpectedly to undermine, deliberately or otherwise, the present status quo.

The set-up is plain enough: Kate and Deeley, a married couple, live in “a converted farmhouse” near the sea. Deeley is a documentary film-maker; Kate appears to be something of a dreamy recluse content to remain in friendless isolation while Deeley “travels the globe” for his work.  Their opening conversation centers on the imminent arrival of Anna, a friend of Kate’s from twenty years ago when both were “innocent secretaries” living in an Edenic post-war London of concerts and cafes where “artists and writers and sometimes actors collected.” Or so Anna proclaims upon entering the scene from the shadows like a specter materializing out of the past.

But Anna is no ghost come from the grave, though some segment of the industry of scholarship that has attached itself to Pinter’s plays might argue as much–some going so far as to say that all three characters are in fact dead, or are irreconcilable fragments of a single shattered personality. Not, however, according to Pinter who asserted in an interview with the New York Times Mel Gussow forty years ago: “I’ll tell you one thing about Old Times. It happens. It all happens.”

And what happens upon Anna’s entrance is a kind of psychological tennis match between Deeley and Anna with Kate as the net, the ball, the baseline and the victor’s trophy. As the play proceeds and the tensions between Deeley and Anna escalate in dialogue that twists and turns and both skirts and bluntly states the issue, sometimes quite comically, sometimes not, the two women seem to draw increasingly closer, all but morphing into their earlier pre-Deeleyan selves. (Not so innocent secretaries, perhaps.)

Accordingly, Deeley begins to resemble more and more the marginalized protagonist played by James Mason in his favorite film, Odd Man Out. Both are on the run for their lives, Mason literally, Deeley figuratively, though the desperation is the same. But Kate has other things in mind, and when at last she speaks her piece, irrevocably and with a chilling, almost oracular dispassion, Deeley is no longer alone in his psychic banishment. Anna has joined him there as well.

Finally, Old Times is a play of subterranean psychological, emotional and sexual currents that motivate its characters to say what they say as a means of trying to make strategic sense both of each other and of their own lives, as well as to defend the shifting terrain on which they uncertainly stand. That it manages to amuse, entertain, tease the brain and touch the darker reaches of the heart as much as it does while traversing such dangerous territory is one of the reasons that it holds a special appeal for this unrepentant admirer of the plays of Harold Pinter.

Frank Corrado