[Photo from Old Times] Old Times
Harold Pinter
1993
Baltimore Theatre Project, Baltimore, Maryland
"In Xerxes Mehta's production of Harold Pinter's Old Times, the first of The Maryland Stage Company's presentations in the city of Baltimore, the mysteries of this enigmatic drama become hauntingly clear. Which is not to suggest that they are solved, something of an impossibility in a Pinter production. Rather, they are made palpable through very clear directorial decisions about image and subject....For those critics who have sometimes accused Pinter of being cold, this production serves as a rejoinder, suggesting always the depths of the restrained passion that leads to its lethal finale....The final moments of Old Times, the most difficult because of Kate's long monologue, are played with stunning literalness. The feeling is that one has strayed into a Shakespearean production (it is not surprising that the company recently performed King Lear). As Kate destroys first Anna and then Deeley with her words, the characters seem actually to die--Anna lies down as if killed by the speech, her hands go limp and she gives the open-eyed blind stare of the dead. The suggestion of a death for Deeley is there as well when he lies across Kate's lap, receives no response, and also goes limp. When he crosses back to his chair, his walk is that of a dead man. It becomes clear that Kate has won through to a kind of new strength at great cost. When the lights become ultra-bright on the final tableau, the effect is like the end of Lear or Hamlet. The resonance is mythic, although any sense of renewal is tempered by what has been lost. All passion spent, one feels that someone should 'take up the bodies.'...The Maryland Stage Company's production of Old Times plays the silence to perfection, the silence in which Pinter's characters most deeply reside."
--Theatre Journal

Photo credit: Clarence A. Carvell

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