A Masterpiece Has Found The Production It Deserves
by Charles Spencer | July 8, 2004 | Daily Telegraph
OLD TIMES by Pinter ;Helen McCrory as Anna ;
Credit: Ivan Kyncl / ArenaPAL ;
www.arenapal.com
So many of Pinter’s plays inhabit a predominantly masculine world, in which one chap is always trying to get one over another. The rooms in which his dramas are set become battlegrounds – for territory, possession and control.
But in what for me are undoubtedly his greatest dramas, women emphatically make their presence felt, too. You only have to think of Betrayal, The Homecoming and of course, this piece, Old Times (1971), to realise what a master Pinter is at conveying the thrill, the mystery and the destructive force of desire.
His work can be viewed as a series of illustrations of various forms of bullying and intimidation, whether at a personal or a political level, and these persistent motifs are certainly present in Old Times. But so too is a seam of dangerous, provocative sexuality and a fascinating analysis of memory – its almost hallucinatory clarity, its possible unreliability and the devious uses to which it can be put.