stage One measure of a dramatic production is its success in bringing out qualities not apparent to a reader. On seeing director Francine Smith’s Old Times, I realized I had overlooked much of the play’s humor amid the ominous stares, pregnant silences and coded commonplaces that were expected features of Harold Pinter’s 1971 script. Such are the perils of preconception and the humbling pleasures of having it overturned: I went to see Pinterian “theater of menace” and ended up enjoying a wacky absurdist comedy.
 The best of times: Daria Okugawa, Chris Baumer and Boomie Pedersen get their stories straight in Harold Pinter’s Old Times at Live Arts. |
The most obvious laughs are sparked by Deeley, the patronizing husband played by Chris Baumer as an off-center (Deeley’s own term) representative of pompous English conventionality. Behind a screen of platitudes spoken in what Kingsley Amis would call an RAF officer-class accent, he fights an obscure war for the soul of his wife, Kate (Daria Okugawa), against the friend of her youth, Anna (Boomie Pedersen), who is visiting the couple at their seaside farmhouse. The weapons on both sides are recited memories—shifting, suspect, always unverifiable—of the trio’s first acquaintance 20 years before. Did Anna share with Kate a bohemian London life for which marriage to Deeley was poor compensation? Did Deeley, as he insists, know Anna in those years from a pub called the Wayfarer’s Tavern and a party at which he stared up her skirt? Was she wearing Kate’s underpants at the time? And who knows best how Kate should dry herself after a bath? The rival claims and counter-claims encircle Kate like the nets (part of the set design) that hang between stage and audience, until Kate herself slashes at both sets of pretensions with a story of her own.
Whatever all of this may “mean”—and Pinter has always resisted interpretations of his work—the subtle authority of both acting and directing make Smith’s production a spectacle of technical mastery. I hesitate to pick a favorite from such a strong cast, but Pedersen’s dominance seems attributable to more than the richness of her part. Sly, precise and deliberately stagey, her beautiful delivery reminds us (along with the multiple pourings of beverages) that Old Times, in one of its oddly angled aspects, is a parody of English drawing-room drama.