Harold Pinter’s comic Old Times is set in an isolated house occupied by a middle-aged married couple. His job takes him around the world and she takes long walks to the distant beach. Their passion is elsewhere and elsewhen.
Their ennuie is suddenly broken by a visitor, an old friend and mutual acquaintance who churns up old memories. The husband is greatly stimulated by the presence of the unattached woman and tries to reach back to his remembered delights of the time when the three first met.
But the incidents he remembers are not remembered in the same way by the women and each recounting becomes its own myth, irreconcilable with the others’. Rather than different facets of the same truth, there is no truth, only stories to be told and told again.
Courtney Walsh plays Kate in the first half of the play, aloof, cool, and preoccupied. She tries to keep her husband’s feet on the ground, but he is irrepressibly excited to have two women in his house. Her actions are the results of years' of studied effort, bringing her husband back to earth again and again from his romantic illusions.
Cristina Anselmo plays Anna vivaciously and passionately, the woman from the past who charges the couple with energy. She is just as realistic about romance as Kate but plays in the romantic space, frolics in illusion, teasing Deeley. Cristina’s diction is exquisite as she sensuously shapes her syllables, amplifying her body's language.
The two actresses trade parts in the second half of the play, exchanging personalities and further disjoining what you think is true. On alternate performances, they exchange again.
Of the three characters, Rush Rehm’s Deeley traverses the greatest emotional range. He is alternately delighted and disappointed, excited and depressed. The philosophical war of the play takes place within his boyish personality. He is the soul of romance and its erotic possibility, travelling the world in search of romance, once or twice letting it slip that there is nothing out there but the search, that reality is a desert.
The comic surface thinly veils the profound tragedy within. By acquiring language and the ability to abstract, we divorce ourselves from nature, from each other, and even that most precious modern possession, our very own immutable self. By naming things, we extract them from nature and add them to our flawed mythology.
Old Times is a wonderful theatre experience and it plays at the Piggott Theater on campus until July 24th.
Old Times is part of the Stanford Summer Theater Memory Play Festival, which includes Seneca’s Oedipus, a film series, a symposium, and an 8-week continuing studies course.
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