old-time

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Old Times is a play by the Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. It was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London on June 1, 1971. It starred Colin Blakely, Dorothy Tutin, and Vivien Merchant, and was directed by Peter Hall. The play was dedicated to Hall to celebrate his 40th birthday.

Peter Hall also directed the Broadway première, which opened at the Billy Rose Theater in New York on November 16, 1971, starring Robert Shaw, Rosemary Harris and Mary Ure; and a year later, the German language premiére of the play at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with Maximilian Schell, Erika Pluhar and Anna-Marie Duringer. In February 2007 Hall returned again to the play directing a new production with his Theatre Royal, Bath company.

Plot

When the rich and cultured Anna visits her old friend, Kate, and Kate's down to earth Irish husband, Deeley, in the country, they reminisce competitively about “old times” – and this quickly turns into a duel of memory between Anna and Deeley for control of Kate. The winner will be the one who can impose his or her version of the past - which of Anna or Deeley has possessed more of Kate? Deeley boasts about how he picked up Kate in a cinema showing Odd Man Out, walked her home and bedded her. Anna parries with detailed tales of their life when they lived together and of the time that she found a man crying in Kate’s bed. Every question is an attempt to control and every answer a swift evasion.

The passive and mostly silent Kate ultimately shows that it is she who has the control over both Anna and Deeley. The play demonstrates that the power to manipulate memory can be as dangerous as any weapon as characters relive and revise their own histories to cement or break the social bonds between each other.

Quotations

• “If you have only one of something you can't say it's the best of anything.”
• ”There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.”
• ”I was interested once in the arts, but I can't remember now which ones they were.”
• ”You have a wonderful casserole…I mean wife.”

List of characters

• Deeley
• Kate
• Anna

Themes

Harold Pinter:

• “One way of looking at speech is to say it is a stratagem to cover nakedness.”
• “What goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism.”
• “The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.”
• “A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”

Cecily in The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde::

• "Memory usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.”

Selected production history

Some recent productions

• 1985 Theatr Clwyd revival by Lindy Davies, at the Emlyn Williams Studio in May, transferred to Wyndham's Theatre, London, starring Leigh Lawson, Harriet Walter and Julie Christie; with a darkly imposing brick back-drop designed by Julian McGowan.

• 2004 Donmar Warehouse, London: directed by Roger Michell, with Jeremy Northam, Gina McKee and Helen McCrory; played against an abstract mirrored set design by William Dudley

• 2005 The Wharf, Sydney: directed by Lindy Davies and starring Elizabeth Alexander as Kate, Angela Punch McGregor as Anna and William Zappa as Deeley.

• 2007 UK tour: directed by Peter Hall, starring Neil Pearson as Deeley, Janie Dee as Kate and Susannah Harker as Anna; with a timbered setting designed by Lucy Hall [1]

• 2007 Neptune Theatre (Halifax), Canada: directed by Brian Richmond and starring Ruth Madoc-Jones, Dan Lett and Lenore Zann.

References

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