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| Robert Shaw, Mary Ure, Rosemary Harris. |
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| Rosemary Harris, Robert Shaw, Mary Ure. |
Old Times, by
Britain’s then most respected dramatist, offered a controversially enigmatic
excursion into the dim hallways of the remembered past and its effects on the
relations of three characters. These are film director Deeley (Robert
Shaw), his wife of 20 years, Kate (Mary Ure), and Anna (Rosemary Harris), Kate’s
college friend of two decades earlier. In Deeley’s sparsely decorated seaside
country home, Deeley and Kate greet Anna’s arrival.
During the course of the often mysterious, evocatively
surrealistic, pause-and-non sequitur-filled conversations that ensue, the
characters recall their past of many years earlier. Anna and Kate may or may
not have been lovers, Deeley and Anna may or may not have met previously. Their
memories are shifting and elusive; the actual and the imagined past are
intermingled, impossible to unravel, and the impression of past events, even
when false, seems to bear more weight than the factual events that actually
give rise to those impressions.
Anna herself may not be real—she may be dead or possibly
just an aspect of Kate that Deeley has conjured up from his imagination. In the
cat and mouse parry and thrust of chatter among the three, Deeley appears to be
forever dominated by the women. He ends the play weeping in a position of
subservience to his wife.
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| Mary Ure, Robert Shaw, Rosemary Harris. |
A sexual tension underlies the action throughout, as Deeley
clearly desires both women, and they, in turn, appear to hunger for one
another. Pinter himself described the play as “about sexuality, and the key to
the play is the line, ‘Normal, what’s normal?’”
There were a number of extremely positive critiques of Old Times, among them Clive Barnes’s
vigorous approval of it as “the finest play yet of a master dramatist. . . .
This is a marvelous play, beautiful, meaningful and lyrical. A joyous,
wonderful play, that people will talk about as long as we have theatre . . .
and a great cast in what I am tempted to think of as a great play.” Old Times, observed Henry Hewes, “is . .
. an indelible theatre etching, and a delicious excursion into the tricky
business of memory.” Its central message, he said, was “that the fatal
fascination of a woman can be her secrecy, and that the curses of a man can be
his passionate need to penetrate that secrecy.”
Martin Gottfried was among those who were disappointed. He
noted that Pinter’s “technique has taken on the quality of a playwright’s game
that seems as coy as the characters who play it.” T.E. Kalem was bored by the “flaccid”
characters, and Walter Kerr suggested that the author had robbed the work of an
important dimension by playing down the active role of the environment in the
proceedings. John Simon, perhaps the most consistently outspoken anti-Pinterite
among New York critics, found Old Times an
empty exercise: “In Pinter, I see only a clever ex-actor turned playwright full
of surface theatricality underneath which resides a big, bulging zero.” He
attacked the play as “A parlor game” in which “we care neither about the
characters nor about the issues.” The fact that the 70-minute drama, lengthened
by its many pauses, had been passed off as a full-length work was “pitiful” to
Simon, who would live long enough to see such relatively short plays become increasingly
common in the next century.
Barely anyone quarreled with the masterful production,
staged with noteworthy understatement by Sir Peter Hall (who had done it earlier
in Paris and London). Also highly admired were John Bury’s coolly chic set and
lighting, and the sensitive, virtuosic portrayals by the dream cast of Shaw,
Ure, and Harris.
Old Times received
a Tony nomination as Best Play, and a Drama Critics Circle Special Citation.
Rosemary Harris’s acting, Peter Hall’s direction, and John Bury’s scenic design
also received Tony nominations, while Hall and Harris each won a Drama Desk
Award, and Bury won Variety’s poll
for Best Designer.