In rehearsal for a revival of “Old Times” in 1984, the Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins asked Harold Pinter to explain the show’s ambiguous ending. The playwright’s flippant nonresponse, in his posh British accent: “I don’t know. Just do it.”
Whether Pinter actually knew the play’s true meaning and merely chose to hold his cards close to his chest, or was just as flummoxed as everybody else by what he had written, remains a mystery.
But that there are so many various interpretations of “Old Times” feels only fitting. The absurdist drama, after all, deals with the malleability of truth, how words and memory can shape our subjective realities. For Pinter to have given one definitive answer to Hopkins’ question would have gone against the spirit of the play that he had written.
Director Peter Pasyk’s chic new revival for Soulpepper, now running at the Michael Young Theatre, similarly embraces the play’s ambiguity. It doesn’t attempt to foist a single interpretation onto the material. Nor does it try to fit Pinter’s prickly, abstract work into the mould of realism. Instead, this production mostly, if not always successfully, revels in the unsettling, the uncomfortable and the unnatural.
Moreover, it also quite wondrously makes this 54-year-old work feel new once again — as if Pinter has written it now, as a pointed rebuke of those who cling to power by twisting history in their favour, employing words as their ammo.
The multiple layers to Pinter’s three-hander are complex. On its surface, the play’s setup is much like many others. A dinner party. A married couple. A guest who disrupts the status quo.
The guest here is Anna (Jenny Young), who’s visiting her old pal Kate (Anita Majumdar) after more than 20 long years. The unlikely friends could not be more different. Whereas Anna is gregarious and outgoing, Kate is shy and reserved.
But what begins as a rather benign get-together goes sideways as memories of the past rush into the present. Kate’s husband, Deeley (Christopher Morris), insists this is his first time ever meeting Anna, whose friendship to Kate predated their marriage. Yet Anna’s recollections soon contradict Deeley’s. Words fly and memories are twisted as a battle for dominance ensues.
As Pinter’s play tumbles further into the realm of the abstract and the absurd, broader questions about the three characters arise. Are Anna, Kate and Deeley alive? Or are they all dead, and inhabiting some sort of purgatory? Are Kate and Anna different characters, or meant to represent two personalities of a single person? Or is the play entirely taking place in Deeley’s subconscious?
Those are just some of the popular interpretations of Pinter’s play from throughout the years. And Pasyk’s production seems open to all of them. (So if you’re familiar with the material going in, you can pick your poison or, like me, run through all these various interpretations as you’re watching the show.)
But what’s most mesmerizing about this new revival is how Pasyk renders the play’s themes of power and dominance. He stages the action on Snezana Pesic’s cold, Nordic set almost like a game of chess.
When the play opens, it’s Deeley who’s in a position of power, sitting in a chair centre stage, interrogating his wife about her memories of Anna. When their guest eventually arrives, she’s seated in a chaise longue opposite Kate. Anna’s open, vulnerable, like a pawn about to be captured. But before we know it, she’s strutting across the board, like a queen hunting stray knights and bishops sitting duck. Blink and it’s now Anna sitting centre stage, in control of the evening, with Deeley left in her former place.
Pinter’s 75-minute drama is filled with weighty moments of silence. While some directors elect to ignore these infamous “Pinter pauses,” Pasyk has wisely chosen to keep most, if not all, of them in tact. In his production, these sometimes lengthy stretches without dialogue roil with tension. Deeley, Anna and Kate lock eyes intermittently, exchanging steely glances. The air is sexually charged, hot and heavy.
Less secure is Pasyk’s handling of the shorter breaks that Pinter embeds into his text. Especially in the play’s opening scene with Anna and Deeley, these pauses feel tentative and hesitant, as if they were a result of unintentional issues with pacing.
Indeed, on opening night, some of the actors still seemed to be finding their footing with the play’s pacing. Young, so far, is most successful in the meatiest role of Anna. Her portrayal is wily and serpentine, with lines of dialogue coiled insidiously by their ends. It’s a performance at once captivating and chilling.
Majumdar, however, whose Kate spends much of the play reacting to the other two characters, is missing some power in the delivery of her lines, while Morris struggles with some of his character’s Pinterian pauses.
I’ll be curious to see how these performances evolve through the course of this month-long run. But, ultimately, the strength of Pasyk’s production lies in its handling of the play’s themes.
This is a show that speaks to our primal urges. To topple each other with nothing more than our words. To control the truth. To manipulate the past to suit our present.
As with many Pinter plays, it’s tempting to try to find answers to questions in the work that the playwright clearly wants to leave unanswered. I have my own theories about some of the finer details in “Old Times.” But at risk of over-intellectualizing and spoiling more than I already have, I shall (flippantly) close with this: I don’t know. Just see it.
