The Toronto Theatre Review: Soulpepper Theatre’s Old Times
By Ross
“Can’t you remember?” he asks his wife, who is reclined with ease and tension on the angular couch, referring to the female guest who is arriving soon for a visit and the past life the two women shared when they lived together, as best friends and flatmates. It’s a straightforward question that rattles around the entirety of Harold Pinter’s fascinating abstraction that is Old Times. On entering I reminded both myself and my theatre companion that the play, now unraveling itself most dynamically on the well-formed Soulpepper Theatre stage, was meant to feel realistic, but, in Pinter’s own words, “what I’m doing is not realism,” and as directed with an unrushed but focused air by Peter Pasyk (Stratford’s Love’s Labour’s Lost), this Old Times doesn’t fail to deliver on the abstract promise.
The last time I saw Harold Pinter’s 1971 play, Old Times, was when it was most elegantly revived by Roundabout Theatre Company in 2015. Starring the undeniably captivating Clive Owen as husband Deeley, alongside Eve Best as Anna and Kelly Reilly as Kate, the shining stars revolved fascinatingly around this three-character memory creation play with sensuality and sexuality at its tense core. And although the Soulpepper Theater Company‘s excellent and deliberate production isn’t exactly sizzling with erotic undertones and fire, the outcome is as fascinating and deliciously unwrapped as one could have hoped for.
The play is the wildest of rides, where interpretations of what it is trying to say fly around in the air like an insect looking for something to land on and devour. Staged within a clever, dramatic living space that has an air of elegance and isolation, created by angles of coldness stitched with tones of passion, Old Times begins with the husband and wife discussing intensely the impending visit of an old friend of Kate’s. Unpacked within stilted questions and answers, backdropped with a sunset and the sound of waves, most cleverly formed by set and costume designer Snezana Pesic (Soulpepper’s The Seagull) with sharp lighting by Imogen Wilson (Crow’s Wights) and a solid sound by Jacob Lin 林鴻恩 (Tarragon’s Withrow Park), the curious Deeley, portrayed deviously by Christopher Morris (Soulpepper’s Noises Off), leans in with his inquiry, but the forgetful and banal Kate, played distantly by Anita Majumdar (Tarragon’s Interior Design), never really engages with him about her one and only friend Anna, who has been standing with her back to us the whole time. But in an unclear moment of intrigue, Anna, played with a clandestine crispness by Jenny Young (Tarragon’s The Realistic Joneses), reorganizes her gaze, from the wild and wandering outside landscape to the stark and deceptively secure interior, and dives in with a vengeance.
“Are you talking about me?” she asks, and with that formulation tossed forward, the friendly visit of long-ago friends has begun. But what transpires from that point forward is sharply undefined and fragmented, anchored in a tense volley of oddly competitive conversations that never find their realistic flow. It swings and shifts gear without provocation, with the cast captivatingly slinging Pinter’s choice of lyrics and text inside a tight physicality. It careens and shifts itself around the room, almost as obsessively as the focus, zeroing in on one reclined interloper before moving on to another. Where this piece is going is forever vague, almost undescribable, and also solely up to your own twisted interpretation.
I’ve read many interpretations of this play. One puts forth the concept of an internalized dialogue of a deranged, desperate woman confined on her own, restructuring, rewriting, and reliving a memory conflict to uncover an adoring outcome that she is at the center of, not based on reality. “There are things I remember which may never have happened,” Anna fascinatingly states at one point, “but as I recall them, so they take place”.
Another explores the idea that Kate and Anna are different personalities of the same woman battling for acceptance and/or domination within, as the very real and loving man watches and fights to keep the one that had been killed off from reentering their lives and sending them all into a state of chaos. And there are so many more ideas about what this play is trying to say, and how we can structure it into something more structural, so we may better understand its focus and detailing. Regardless of which road you decide to travel on (and you don’t necessarily need to choose one, to be honest), Old Times keeps us leaning into the crackle as it drives forward down a winding road, taking us all on a fascinating ride with no logical endpoint, and one expertly executed by this terrific cast.
For me, Young as the confident, upright Anna is spectacular in an undefined, twisted kind of way; a fragmented, yet confident sexual visitor from the past who isn’t likely to be a victim any time soon. Is she real? I’m not sure, but regardless, we can’t take our eyes off her as she slides around and seduces the room with her stare, her posture, and her delivery of song and statement. And the same goes for Morris as Kate’s husband, Deeley, but without the electricity of sexual danger or compulsion that I half expected to come zigzagging outward from his stance.
The delusion embedded inside the play’s concept is unearthed in Morris’s tight performance of a man drawn to the two women who take up polar opposite positions within that unclarified hypnotic space. Sometimes he seems to amplify his own staunch, unwavering persona, adding layers of complexity and opening up new interpretations. Is this him playing with the guest, or a re-imagined, redesigned character fighting for domination in an internalized fantasy world for the distraught and delusional? But Majumdar, as the fragmented and separated Kate, tries to strike a perfect balance between being present and being an interested but passive observer, watching but also participating in moments that almost feel forced upon her, or the room.
She is discussed, as if she’s not present (or even alive), in a way that feels staged to feed her ego or enhance her blushing state of being, but are we ever truly curious or drawn to her character? Her restrained smile hints at secrets she may not even fully understand, leaving us to wonder what is truly beneath her composed exterior. And her smoking never really feels authentic or connected to the moment or her character. Is she the creator or an active participant fighting for her life? Or is she a symbol and focus for the love of these two? It’s hard to say, and her somewhat flat delivery doesn’t help guide us to any definable interpretation. Still, the play is consistently fun to play with, turning over framings to see what is written on the back, hoping for a clue, but often only to find further questions that spin us off in new, contradictory directions and solutions.
“They don’t make them like that anymore,” says one of the three fragmented souls that make up Harold Pinter’s twisted Old Times, a play that was ranked among the 40 greatest plays ever by London’s The Independent, and described as one of Pinter’s “most haunting and unnerving pieces.” And I can see why. It’s a triangular enactment that never stops playing with your mind as actively as those characters play and entertain emotionally with each other. We are caught and drawn in, like moths to a flame, trying our hardest to make sense of something that might not need such a realistic structure and vantage point. But it has a strong force and draw. Confusing at points, and intoxicating us at others.
But isn’t that what Pinter wanted from this? Wanted to do to us? It has been said that during rehearsals for a 1984 production, the play’s star, Anthony Hopkins, asked Pinter to explain the play’s ending to him. Pinter responded, “I don’t know. Just do it.” And I say the same. Some mysteries we’re simply meant to ponder, not fully solve.
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