Old Times never really sparks into anything more gripping than a conversation between a woman, her husband and her ex-roommate about things that may or may not have occurred 20 years before.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Title: Old Times
Written by: Harold Pinter
Performed by: Anita Majumdar, Christopher Morris, Jenny Young
Directed by: Peter Pasyk
Company: Soulpepper Theatre Company
Venue: Michael Young Theatre
City: Toronto
Year: Runs to Sept. 7
“Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” fictional TV mob boss Tony Soprano once memorably quipped on his eponymous HBO drama.
The line’s funny because it’s true: Rhapsodizing about the past requires little by way of critical thought or insight. It’s a little like listening to a friend describe the outlandish dream they had last night – it’s not fun unless you’re somehow part of it.
Harold Pinter’s Old Times, playing until Sept. 7 in a frustrating production at Soulpepper, digs into the banality of unpicking the past. At its best, Pinter’s text, taut and drafty, is a ghost story, a snapshot of a bygone era full of intrigue and psychosexual tension.
But Peter Pasyk’s production, though exquisitely designed, pads the play with lengthy silences that undercut the momentum baked into Pinter’s writing. Arguments that ought to be fiery merely sputter; events that ought to shock simply stall.
The end result is a chewy affair, a 70-minute Old Times that never sparks into something more gripping than a conversation between a woman, her husband and her ex-roommate about things that occurred (or did they?) 20 years ago, out of sight and out of step with the questions of the present.
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When we meet Kate (Anita Majumdar) and her husband Deeley (Christopher Morris), what immediately stands out about their home is its emptiness – the crisp lines of their mid-century couches, the slight tilt of their living room floor. Snezana Pesic’s angular set design suggests a couple in perpetual search of softness – nowhere is there a comfortable spot to rest.
Kate’s college friend Anna (Jenny Young), who’s visiting the duo from Italy, soon adds some needed spunk to the space, egging on her old pal and unspooling the man she married as the evening hours give way to dawn.
Soon enough, the spikes of Pinter’s premise become clear: the sexual edge to Anna’s friendliness, and the spectral plane of existence not altogether shared by the people onstage. Do all three of these characters exist as living, breathing people? Are Anna and Kate somehow disparate halves of a whole? That’s not altogether clear.
Old Times sadly feels like a less potent rehash of the string of dinner-party-goes-wrong plays of the past year.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Pasyk’s production doesn’t try to answer those questions, but it doesn’t really wrestle with them, either. Anna, Kate and Deeley speak to each other as if narrating their own psyches; there’s not much of a tug between their various stories. Morris holds his own, injecting Deeley with tantalizing flashes of grit and nuance, but Young and Majumdar don’t have space to do the same, resulting in a dissatisfying play wet with unpursued possibilities despite the best efforts of the actors.
As mentioned, however, the production looks just as it should, clean and crisp and eye-catching. Jacob Lin’s restrained sound design ably captures everything from the dull hum of everyday anxiety to the roar of panic; Imogen Wilson’s lighting does the same, doling out frenetic bursts and strobes in measured, effective doses.
In the last year, Toronto audiences have had ample chances to squirm at the hands of boozed-up academics and well-to-do yuppies: Old Times trods similar thematic ground to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Wights and Winter Solstice, all given surprisingly naturalistic productions within the last 12 months.
But Old Times is not a naturalistic play, or at least it shouldn’t be. On the page, it reads like a predecessor to Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, or even Sarah Kane’s Blasted. It ought to sizzle.
Under a more precise directorial vision, Old Times might have abstracted Pinter’s ideas into a thrilling response to the more grounded meditations on privilege, power and the past Toronto audiences saw earlier this season. But at present, the play feels less like a retort and more like an echo – a less potent rehash of the string of dinner-party-goes-wrong plays of the past year.
Is there a case to be made to reinterpret and produce these late-20th-century works of the British canon in 2025’s Toronto? Of course. But Old Times feels somehow stuck in the throat of its circumstances – a relic forced to speak for itself from behind a wall of fatty silence.
