★★★★☆
Four Stars
Jazz music slips warmly from the speakers as we take our seats in front of a rather classically furnished living room: a couple of couches, a dark window to the left, to the right a desk laden with drinks tray and record player, and in the centre, a self-consciously decked coffee table. Exir Kamalabadi’s yellowish lighting is realist and will prove perfectly synced. In a sense, the darkly uterine space of the Burton Taylor Studio could not have been more suited to host Pinter’s claustrophobic chamber piece. The BT’s tiny stage is necessarily either level with or lower than the audience, and this is in keeping with the riddles of voyeurism and exposure they are about to watch unfold between Old Times’ three protagonists.
The premise seems simple: Kate (Emily Warren) and Deeley (Cassian Bilton) have been married twenty years and are about to receive a visit from one of Kate’s oldest — and only, as it happens — friends, Anna, who lives in Sicily but has travelled to England. But, in true Pinteresque fashion, the plot thickens before Anna (Sophie Ablett) even arrives, and the audience witnesses the interaction between husband and wife, wife and friend, friend and husband, steadily become more and more tortuous, more and more taut.
Admittedly, as the play started, the Warren-Bilton pair lagged just a little behind it at first — but after a slightly chilled beginning, they swiftly settled into the warped rhythm of half-truths and full lies, manipulation and evasion, menace and mockery that pervades the play. By the time Ablett-as-Anna has finished her first burst of speech, all three actors’ work on a form of overstrung naturalism has paid off, and the whole thing is ticking like tightly twisted clockwork.
Well thought-out blocking and attention to body language by director Sabrina Sayeed gives an otherwise difficult piece — no plot to speak of really, nor movement from the living room except Kate’s long bath and return — a certain tempo, a dramatic legibility. When Anna and Deeley perch on one side of the central couch, to sing at Kate sitting folded into herself at the room’s opposite corner, you know where the alliance directs its hostility. And when Anna and Kate let surface their long-dormant but suddenly-awakened intimacy, and begin to circle closer to each other while Deeley drinks angrily by himself, you also know that you are witnessing a new kind of ganging up, which insidiously excludes the husband.
Ultimately, the actors do justice to Pinter’s heavily portentous dialogues. The few stutters do not detract from otherwise finely-absorbed lines, and they get the chemistry between this tense ménage à trois pretty much down. Dealing with a symbolism that can transform humming into bullying, reminiscing into sexual humiliation, and apparent social flattery into stifling eulogy is no easy task, a bit like walking on theatrical eggshells — too much and it seems histrionic, too little and the audience’ll miss it or you’ll sound flat.
Still, the entire team, well cast and quite well directed, rose to the occasion and produced a sincere, relatively tight production, with at times its own perverse pulses of brilliance.
