Old Times by Harold Pinter is currently playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Peter Pasyk.  It premiered in 1971 in London and i’s very much an artefact of its time and place besides being decidedly weird in a Pinteresque way.  A well off married couple living somewhere fairly remote on the English coast are being visited by the woman who, twenty years earlier, was the wife’s roommate when they were both young “secretaries” in London but who is now married to a Sicilian aristo.

Over the course of an evening and a morning the three characters discuss past and present but the timeline is fluid; alternating, for no apparent reason, between “then” and “now.”  It’s also unclear what’s true, what’s a deliberate lie and what’s false memory.  Did the husband, Deeley, really meet the visitor, Anna, in a pub and take her to a party where he spent the evening staring up her skirt at his wife-to-be’s borrowed underwear?  And so on.

And so, with pregnant pauses and more or less inexplicable outbursts (Deely has the anger management skills of the typical British male of the period) we explore “then”; the south-west London of artsy pubs and cafes and rooms with gas fires that one had to feed with shillings, and “now”; empty, comfortable existence, while trying to figure out who the three characters “really” are and how they are/were related.  This being Pinter there are no answers.

It’s a weird, discomfiting way to spend an hour and a quarter but also fascinating and I think the production gets it about right.  The relatively slow pace and the pauses feel necessary.  The acting is excellent.  Christopher Morris’ Deely is just slightly unhinged; typical male of time and place.  Jenny Young is deadpan ambiguous as Anna and Anita Majumdar who, as Kate, has far fewer lines than the other two, has a really disturbing stillness about her.

We don’t see a lot of Pinter in Toronto and I guess he’s something of an acquired taste but this production is on the money and worth seeing for anyone who’s curious about serious theatre in London in the 1970s.

Old Times continues in the Michael Young Theatre until September 7th.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz