Pinter's Old Times is a strange choice for revival, it makes one feel Pinter is over-rated: the clipped non-sequitors about a vegetarian casserole, the stilted over stylized speech prevent the audience caring about the protagonists. The play's preoccupation with memory as a weapon is painfully dramatized when a husband and wife clash over past events.
      Deeley, Kate's husband, is threatened by the arrival of her best friend, Anna, who lives in Sicily pursuing what he dismissively calls the 'lobster sauce ideology we know nothing about.' Deeley is keen to disentangle their lives, to relegate Anna to the hazy past and assert the very different present which he shares with Kate and her casseroles. But in this play nothing remains watertight. The set is a beautiful curved room by the sea, the sound of breakers scraping over shingle fills the theatre and we watch ripples lapping and encroaching upon the stage. The flickering water-light is deceptive and symbolic of the mind's liquid grasp of the past.
      The play begins in darkness with Anna's back to the audience and she remains an ambiguous presence throughout. Is she real or imagined? Both Deeley and Kate sit at the front of the stage in the rounded womb-like space of their house by the sea. We could be inside someone's skull where Anna is a bad memory a dark outline which threatens to burst into consciousness every evening.
      Anna and Deeley sing snatches of popular songs to Kate; both demonstrate by their choice of lyric how different their versions of events are. Deeley's rendition of Blue Moon makes sure Kate is once more alone (Blue Moon I saw you standing alone). It becomes clear through Neil Pearson's increasing aggression that his identity is at stake. What if events are remembered wrong and he is written out of his shared life with Kate? In dramatic terms the swapping of song lyrics was very contrived and contributed to the play's stiff, unreal quality.
      Deeley's relationship is threatened by a lesbian undercurrent when Anna refuses to belong to the past and initiates a game where she pretends both Kate and her are back in their London flat entertaining suitors. The past becomes the present and it is a present without Deeley. The play doesn't allow for any subtle gradations (other than trademark Pinter menace) as Neil Pearson drinks brandy, clutching the bottle aggressively and recalls how he met Kate ('a bluestocking pick-up') during a performance of the Carol Reed thriller, Odd Man Out. He tackles the perceived lesbianism head-on in his description of the female usherette stroking her breast; however he triumphs in his memory by marrying Kate. 'Robert Newton brought us together,' he says talking of the film, 'and it is only Robert Newton who can tear us apart.
      The ideas are more interesting than the drama. Pinter suggests that personality cannot exist without memory and through the usurping of others' memories, personality itself is attacked. Lovers vie to reclaim parts of themselves in the enactment of shared memories (be it a film or a party) but what happens if events cannot be corroborated? Pinter shows us that characters can be annihilated by being written out of the past in the present. Our reality is constantly being filtered through our understanding of the narrative of our past. Anna goes further. She says we may remember something that never happened, as we recall 'events' they do happen.
      The central and almost silent performance of Kate is a challenge to any actress. She is portrayed as a glacial Princess who simultaneously must convey 'animation,' a word used by her school friend Anna to describe her strange power. Janie Dee managed to convey both pertness and attention despite her clipped dialogue. Kate complains of deadness in the first act, how she used to follow the arts and now she cannot remember which one. But she belongs to the confident dead. She knows what it is to be wanted.
      Both Deeley and Anna are unsure of the past; they both look to Kate in her confident frozen status to validate what happened. She never asks for corroboration. She knows and willfully plays her suitors off against each other. Kate's independence is established in the play's second act when her presence in the shower off stage is suggested by a band of luminous light beneath the bathroom door. Off-stage she haunts the living as they debate whether she was ever any good at drying herself. Deeley suggests powdering her, and then is not sure who should. He asks Anna about Kate's passion and she replies: 'I feel that is your province.' Deeley's now acknowledged husband status is undercut when Kate emerges from the shower fully dried.
      The play's final battle for ownership of the past is let down not by Neil Pearson's acting but by the fact we don't care enough about him sobbing. The clipped, interrogative exchanges stop the audience feeling. We know we're in the presence of some ghastly ritual, perhaps the past has to be battered out like this every night to establish Deeley's disintegrating identity. The idea is powerful but we just don't feel enough.
Daniel Jeffreys