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Post by GreenEyesToo on Feb 4, 2013 18:51:42 GMT
A couple more ( with spoilers): Old Times
Our critic's rating: ****/5
Average press rating: ****/5
Review by Peter Brown
31 Jan 2013
First performed in 1971, this revival of Harold Pinter's three-hander features Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams alternating the roles of Kate and Anna. On the occasion I saw it, Ms Scott Thomas was playing Anna and Ms Williams was Kate. I assume both of these actors are thankful that the play is relatively short (at just 80 minutes, without an interval) since that keeps their task manageable, though still considerably demanding, I would think. There is a further dimension to this role-swapping, as the two female actors will be deciding (on certain performances) their characters by a toss of a coin at the stage door.
Just for completeness, and not to make him feel left-out, I should add that Rufus Sewell takes the role of Deeley, the only male in the play and, apparently, chief coin-tosser for the performances where luck will determine how the female roles are allocated.  Married couple Kate and Deeley live in the country, not far from the sea. Deeley works in films and his work often takes him overseas. When we discover them in their home, they are waiting for Anna to arrive for a visit. Kate shared a flat with Anna when they were both secretaries in London, before either of them got married. Anna now has a wealthy husband and lives in Sicily. Though Kate and Deeley are waiting for Anna to arrive, she is on-stage and in their living room right from the start of the play. And there are moments, almost like flashbacks, when it seems we are witnessing conversations between Anna and Kate which took place back in the time when they were flat-mates. Other than the characters reminiscing about the past, nothing much happens.
There is a dream-like quality to this play. It is also enigmatic and more than a little puzzling as it is not clear just what is really going on. What, for example, is the significance of Anna being on-stage at the start of the play, when the other characters say they are waiting for her to arrive? Is she merely a figment of their imagination? Or, was there more to her relationship with Kate than simple flat sharing? Deeley claims he used to see her at a pub he frequented, and is clearly attracted to her. Is this about his feelings of guilt for an affair he had with Anna? One interpretation of the play considers Anna and Kate to be the same person, and yet another suggests that Kate killed Anna and Deeley because Anna was trying to steal Deeley from her. Though I don't have all of the answers by any means, the play is certainly about memories and how they affect our lives.
Though the play may be difficult to interpret and understand, there is no doubt about the exceptional quality of acting on display here. Three compelling, and well-directed performances make 80 minutes zip by. Kristin Scott Thomas is a refined but rather playful Anna, Rufus Sewell is prone to anger and outbursts, and Lia Williams is a rather haunted Kate. And there is much to admire on the technical side with affective music by Stephen Warbeck and atmospheric lighting by Peter Mumford. Overall, a well-crafted and enjoyable production.
www.londontheatre.co.uk/londontheatre/reviews/oldtimes13.htmBritish Theatre Guide
Review by Philip Fisher
More even than other Pinter plays, Old Times is like a jumbo crossword puzzle that you never quite complete. Ostensibly, it should be simple enough to piece together as a married couple welcome an old friend for a quiet reunion.
With many writers, that would tell us almost all that was necessary to understand the dynamics. Pinter though is a master of the haunting three-hander, having relished the opportunities for alliances and oppositions in The Caretaker and Betrayal just as much as this more rarely viewed classic, first seen in 1971.
It is wonderful to enjoy Ian Rickson's immaculately cast revival in the theatre named for its playwright, the first time but not the last for Pinter at the Pinter, one would wager.
To add to the mystery of this threesome, the parts of Kate the wife and Anna the visitor are played at alternate performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams.
On press night, Miss Williams patiently waited a very long time for her moment to pounce as quiet mousy Kate, far more the object than subject of her fellows' joshing conversations. Before her moment of transformation, she was able to sit back on Hildegard Bechtler's deliberately understated set, easily transforming from bland living room to bland bedroom, and enjoy observing Miss Scott Thomas.
Anna is glamorous and extroverted, constantly posing in her electric blue dress as if for an invisible paparazzo and happily flirting with both husband and wife, fully playing up the sexual possibilities of her role.
Rufus Sewell is the calm, ironic Deeley, a film director husband who has no great qualms about belittling his shy wife.
Gradually, as he reminisces about minor events half a lifetime ago, Deeley gets considerably more excited and seems to be on the edge of violence.
At the same time, we begin to piece together various seemingly unconnected fragments of dialogue to create a whole story showing how close this trio was back in the day when the two women were flatmates.
This involves Deeley too, though it isn't always easy to divide fact from fabrication, nor to know how much information revealed on this single night, in a mere 80 minutes of stage time, was known to each member of the group.
By the end of what can be a sinister as well as comical evening, all three might well have been changed forever, with power switching possibly irrevocably by the final highly illuminated curtain. Even then, with its concentration on the weakness of memory, conclusions are hard to be certain about.
While her colleagues do everything necessary to create an intoxicating evening, Kristin Scott Thomas is absolutely exquisite in the role of Anna. This begs the question as to whether this is the actress or the role. Anyone eager to learn the answer will have to pay for two tickets, in which case they can see each of the actresses in both roles.
Ian Rickson already has one indelible association with Harold Pinter having directed him in his final, triumphant stage appearance in Krapp's Last Tape. This atmospheric production with its three tremendous actors working so well together is another evening involving that partnership for us all to relish.
www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/old-times-harold-pinter-8498 |
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Post by kygal on Feb 4, 2013 20:23:10 GMT
The plays I have attended have been local and small scale. Is this the type role/play/performance he could have another Tony nomination for?
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Post by GreenEyesToo on Feb 4, 2013 20:28:04 GMT
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Post by rueful on Feb 5, 2013 3:32:24 GMT
Thanks for the additional reviews, GE2! Here it would be the Critics' Circle award, the Evening Standard Award, and the Olivier Award. I wouldn't want to jinx anything, but this has been getting VERY good reviews.....  Yes it has!!  Here's another great one, from Variety with SPOILERS
Old Times
By David Benedict
Kristin Scott Thomas, Lia Williams and Rufus Sewell in "Old Times"
The phrase "intensely poetic" is usually a warning sign, the equivalent of "Danger, no tension here." But the intensity of Ian Rickson's ceaselessly fascinating revival of Harold Pinter's "Old Times" is as dramatic as it is poetic. Having Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams swap roles nightly may look like a gimmick, but their double perspective helps elucidate this most mysterious of memory plays. The tangible tension between them and Rufus Sewell proves highly erotic, unusually funny, not a little scary and, ultimately, achingly sad.
"There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place." Anna's measured observation is, for Pinter, unusually explicit. It's the key to both the form and content of the 1971 play that appears to begins with a literal event -- unseen in 20 years, Anna comes to stay with her former housemate Kate and her husband Deeley.
But from the calmly suggestive opening onwards, it's obvious that things are not what they seem. Not only are Kate's formerly withheld memories of her only friend suspiciously hazy, the husband and wife discuss Anna as if she's not there, yet all the while she's standing upstage, silhouetted by the light from a window.
In Hildegard Bechtler's comfortable yet quietly chilly room without a view, the three of them swap conflicting memories. And, as in all shifting triangular relationships, two-against-one power plays move to the fore. Pincer movements and combative alliances grow ever more threatening, the mood darkening from exchanged stories and songs to interrogation, confrontation and manipulation. Merely passing a coffee cup becomes an act of aggression.
Sex and fear are so very definitely in the air that audiences are forced to question what it is they're watching. Is Anna actually there or the product of their imaginations? Is the marriage dangerously loveless? Is Kate dead? Exactly who is the victim here?
Given that there is no single straight answer that "explains" everything, it's a measure of the rigor of Rickson's direction that the parallel interpretations held in balance definitely don't play out as frustrating experiment. That's especially the case in the pairing where Williams plays a taut, tougher Kate to Scott Thomas' knockout Anna.
Although Scott Thomas is feted onscreen for her gripping underplaying of pain and difficulty, she's also a dazzling comedienne, as she proved in London and Gotham in Rickson's scintillating "The Seagull." Deliciously aware of her power while in Kate and Deeley's home -- her Anna positively gleams with grinning self-confidence -- she proffers a compliment. "You have a wonderful casserole." "What?" puzzles Deeley. "I mean wife. So sorry." Her faux sincerity and lethal timing turn the line into an attack that brings the house down. Her audacious performance runs from smoldering sexual enticement to acute yet beautifully restrained distress.
Her range and depth act as a spur to Williams, who is equally at home as a Kate whose anger creeps inexorably through brusque fortitude to shimmering with pain. In the reverse pairing, Scott Thomas is closer to her trademark ineluctable cool with Williams a shade effortful and self-conscious as the fly in the ointment.
Leaping from wicked glee to boiling fury, Sewell almost dances with self-satisfaction. His Deeley is putting on a supreme display of gamesmanship, and audiences are glued to his moods because his complete physical relaxation means he never shows off his preparation. His performance thus arrives as a series of jolting shocks that never feel gratuitous because of the pain revealed to be underpinning them.
For all the glory of the women, Rickson's production reveals Deeley to be the focus of a play that now feels surprisingly autobiographical. Sewell's breadth and weight of emotions suggest the consuming guilt engendered by adultery that Pinter later admitted to in his first marriage and the easy stumbles into rage that sometimes characterized his behavior. But even audiences unacquainted with the playwright who are prepared to park the need for literal explanation will be entranced by this unnerving, extraordinarily penetrating production. Seen once, it's alluring; seen again with the reverse casting, it's spellbinding
www.variety.com/review/VE1117949155/ |
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Post by kygal on Feb 5, 2013 11:31:21 GMT
Thanks for the info GE2. I hated to be premature and even ask that, as I do not want to jinx anything eighter. So many great reviews so I was curious.
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Post by rueful on Feb 6, 2013 1:32:22 GMT
Another excellent review in the New York Times! (with SPOILERS) The Provocations of Harold Pinter
by Matt Wolf
LONDON — Have you ever awakened from a dream wanting to replay events afresh? That’s just the start of the appeal in theatrical terms of the West End revival of “Old Times,” the Harold Pinter play that on this occasion is being presented with its two exemplary actresses, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams, swapping roles.
“Old Times” is the first Pinter play to appear at this particular address since the building was renamed in October 2011 for the onetime Nobel laureate. In its former guise as the Comedy Theatre, the playhouse put on many a Pinter production, a summer 2011 revival of “Betrayal,” starring Ms. Scott Thomas, among them.
But whether viewed in isolation or as part of an ad hoc parade of a seminal dramatist’s spread of work, the director Ian Rickson’s take on a transfixing if shadowy 1971 play clarifies anew the gauzy hinterland of memory. I doubt I’m the only one already searching for an excuse to see it a third time, though I don’t see the play’s lone (and terrific) actor, a commandingly gravelly Rufus Sewell, in this context getting to play anyone else’s part. The production runs through April 6.
The casting conceit is by no means new. Two years ago, Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch alternated the leading roles in “Frankenstein” at the National Theatre and came away with an Olivier Award for their efforts, and the classical canon is rife with assignments in which various performers have traded off parts throughout a run — Gielgud and Olivier, for instance, as Romeo and Mercutio near the start of their careers.
The rewards here extend well beyond an opportunity to bask twice over in two of the country’s most translucent actresses, a pairing that on the basis of skin tone alone makes this distaff duo an apt fit for the porous landscape of Pinter’s cunning, sexy, ultimately highly disturbing play.
Are we watching two versions of the same self? That’s an interpretation of the psychodynamic of a play that finds a married couple, Kate and Deeley, visited at their coastal farmhouse by Anna, Kate’s best friend — perhaps even her only friend — from 20 years before. But as the 80 minutes (no intermission) proceed to a wordless climax that achieves a baleful power, all the facts of the piece are put up for grabs.
No sooner has Deeley expressed a “categorical position” before it is quickly subject to revision, and there are those who regard the play as Pinter’s equivalent “Huis Clos” (“No Exit”), the Jean-Paul Sartre play about two women and a man glimpsed in their own infernal afterlife. That assessment, in turn, tallies with Kate’s comment early on that the others “talk of me as if I were dead,” and Peter Mumford’s ravishing lighting casts a spectral glow culminating in the sudden blinding illumination indicated in the script.
Those seeking precise explication won’t get much of an assist from the playwright. “I can sum up none of my plays,” Pinter once remarked. “I can describe none of them, except to say: That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.”
The description in this instance allows for a delicious game of compare-and-contrast, with the casting pointing up differing approaches to the same demands. Ms. Scott Thomas’s Kate emits the charismatic force field that the onetime Oscar nominee (1996’s “The English Patient”) has brought to her London stage tasks to date, of which there have been five so far, three in conjunction with Mr. Rickson. But give Ms. Williams the same role and the often-silent wife gives off the very separate, and real, suggestion of pain, as if this intrusion from the past into her present has brought with it a trauma almost too troubling to contemplate.
As the giddily flamboyant Anna, Ms. Scott Thomas is more actressy than is her norm, and there are moments in that configuration where she and Mr. Sewell sound as if they are ready to sail off into the realm of Noel Coward. (That’s not altogether inappropriate, given the mordant wit to a verbal landscape in which Anna praises Deeley’s “casserole” when she in fact intends to say the word “wife.”)
In the same role, Ms. Williams suggests a good-time girl feasting on recollections of an, um, lively past scarcely less “volcanic” than the island on which she says she now lives. And when she and Kate face off near the end, the encounter sends Ms. Williams’s Anna flying backward on to the stage floor, whereas Ms. Scott Thomas’s Anna at the same moment remains upright.
Mr. Sewell, in turn, lends a welcome bonhomie to the most obvious odd man out in a play that makes much of the 1947 film of the same name, though it’s characteristic of the strategies of their author that each of the characters registers an exclusion from the other two in his or her own way. Whether pondering words like “lest” or remarking upon his home’s prevailing silence, Mr. Sewell gives off the air of the host at a party from which Deeley risks being cut out; the performance, by turns ferocious and startlingly fragile, represents a smashing return for the actor to the London stage for the first time in nearly seven years.
Mr. Sewell is presumably having fun clocking when his co-stars are wigged and when they are not and noticing differences in costuming that would seem to extend to the two Kates more than the two Annas. What’s immediately clear is that both women are fully up to a task that has been laid out on the show’s Web site, allowing patrons to pick and choose their preferred casting.
The approach assumes a play that can withstand such scrutiny. That was a problem with “Frankenstein,” once one realized that the star performances were of considerably more interest than most everything else about the evening, apart from the set.
No such problems here. Hildegard Bechtler’s shimmering, high-walled scenery further refines the painterliness that the same designer brought last year to “Scenes From an Execution,” a play about art and artists at the National Theatre; the richness of the red in the play’s second half signals a provocation all its own as the talk turns to drying Kate off after her bath: “You can supervise the whole thing,” Deeley tells Anna. “And give me some hot tips while you’re at it.”
But the attendant sensuality, hugely in evidence throughout this of all Pinter plays, is amended by an ending that pulls the trio apart, as if to suggest that all their intimacies no longer apply.
“Do men ripple too?” Deeley at one point asks. Far be it from me to comment on that, but this production of this play absolutely does. www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/arts/06iht-lon06.html?_r=0 |
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Post by kygal on Feb 6, 2013 11:43:55 GMT
Love all the positive reviews. Thanks!
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Post by GreenEyesToo on Feb 6, 2013 12:01:08 GMT
Ah, terrific reviews from Variety and the NYT! Thanks, Rueful! |
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Post by GreenEyesToo on Feb 7, 2013 19:38:06 GMT
A few more, all with spoilers: Theatre review: Old Times at the Harold Pinter Theatre Sarah Shaffi Thursday, February 7, 2013
2:55 PM
We’ve all been there - the odd one out in a group of three - and it’s not a comfortable feeling.That’s the relationship explored in Harold Pinter’s play Old Times, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Lia Williams and Rufus Sewell.
Scott Thomas and Williams alternate the roles of Kate and Anna, and the production I saw had Scott Thomas as Anna and Williams as Kate.
Kate and her husband Deeley (Sewell) open the play discussing an old friend of Kate’s who is coming to visit. The dynamic between the couple is fun and teasing, although there is an undercurrent of something that hides in Kate’s face as Deeley questions her about her relationship with Anna (her “only friend”).
Then in comes Anna - dynamic, full of laughter and memories about the pair’s time together as secretaries in London, getting up for work after glamourous nights out, weekends filled with going to this show and that coffee bar and to see this film.
And so the dynamic on stage changes, as Anna and Deeley try to outdo each other’s stories of old times with Kate in an attempt to become her favourite. Deeley’s tale of seeing Kate for the first time at a film, and Anna’s tale of seeing the same film with Kate aren’t very exciting, but the two characters ham them up with shouted words, dramatic pauses and facial expressions and gestures in an attempt to make their memory of Kate seem the best.
Meanwhile Kate sits and listens, looking increasingly uncomfortable as it becomes obvious that her relationship with Anna was something deeper than friends. At one point Kate accuses Anna of talking about her as if she was dead - an apt observation since for a large part of the play Kate, while being the subject of discussion and the point which Anna and Deeley flit around on stage, is actually a character who seems to do nothing much but react, and even then in an awkward, bland way.
Scott Thomas is compelling as Anna. Her every action, even when the focus is on others, belies that there is more to her relationship with Kate than Deeley knows - particularly poignant is a moment when Anna is clearly reaching for Kate’s hand, only to be rejected and see Kate go to Deeley instead.
Sewell brings both tragedy and comedy to Deeley. As it is revealed that he knows less about her than Anna does, we stop laughing at his over-the-top gestures and booming voice, and start feeling sorry for him as we watch him break down - the last person to believe what he is seeing in front of his eyes.
Williams as Kate has arguably the hardest job in the production. For all the attention paid to Kate by Anna and Deeley, it could be difficult to believe that what either of them are saying about Kate is true - we don’t see the fun-loving young woman she once was when she was living with Anna, or the shy girl that Deeley fell in love with. Instead we see a quiet, private woman, one who seems to be a shadow of the woman Deeley and Anna speak about.
Old Times makes for uncomfortable watching, but only because we feel for all the characters. Thought-provoking and beautifully nuanced, Pinter’s play will leave you hooked on the mystery of what you’ve just seen.
www.london24.com/entertainment/theatre/theatre_review_old_times_at_the_harold_pinter_theatre_1_1868544Old Times at Harold Pinter Theatre
Reviewed by Tom Wicker
****/5 In Ian Rickson’s electrically charged production of Harold Pinter’s enigmatic play, first staged in 1971 and now at the theatre that bears his name, every strained laugh is another tear in the chafing social fabric that binds its central three characters together in the purgatory of their past. Long before the final scene, which twists everything on its head, Pinter has pulled apart the foundations of their identities.
Alongside Rufus Sewell as the overbearing Deeley, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams switch between his wife, Kate, and her long-absent friend, Anna, on alternate nights. This sounds gimmicky, but makes perfect sense in the context of a play in which questions of personality are so vexed and its boundaries so hauntingly porous.
From the outset, Kate (played by Lia Williams when I saw the play) – pale, thin and quiet – is the battleground on which Deeley and Anna pitch up their tents and wage war with each other over coffee and brandy in a dingy front room filled with an air of neglect. As Deeley mockingly interrogates Kate about the soon-to-arrive Anna, her ‘only’ friend as a young woman, he is already tightening the screws that bind her to him.
Sewell is brilliantly awful as the bullying Deeley, wielding his character’s self-regarding humour like a cudgel when the two women’s prior relationship threatens the story of his importance in Kate’s life. A handful of memories – a meeting in a deserted cinema, a glimpse of stocking at a party, a strange man bending over a bed – become explosively totemic.
Pinter’s shard-like writing slashes into social niceties with surgical precision and merciless wit, as a shrill Anna confuses ‘casserole’ with ‘wife’ and competes with Deeley over song lyrics while Kate sits in uneasy silence. Rickson ratchets up the tension by having each character move restlessly between sofas and chairs: a power play of endlessly reconfigured groupings and poses.
Scott Thomas imbues Anna with a frantic girlishness; taut, brittle and looking like a faded print of someone who might never have existed as she clings to Kate and their flat-sharing days. When they are alone, she and Sewell rivetingly evoke the intertwined disgust and intimacy that comes with the revelation of their characters’ (seeming) secret history together.
The past in this play is a place of penetrated spaces, a voyeuristic territory filled with memories that leave their mark like grubby fingerprints; but if we are witness to a crime scene, who is the perpetrator? As images recur and loop in dream-like ways, Pinter blurs the boundaries between his characters in a haunting fashion.
And in the middle of everything is Lia Williams’ Kate – the seemingly absent centre of this existential domestic drama. It’s a difficult role to play, but her character’s withdrawal is her power and Williams’ deadened expression is chilling as Kate reveals the limitless emptiness inside her that has swallowed up everything around her.
As Rickson’s perfectly judged production ends on a desolate tableau, the exaggerated proportions of the set reflect the strange and elusive ghost story that Old Times has become. But the real horror of these desperate, broken and sometimes vile characters is that, whoever they are, they don’t feel nearly otherworldly enough for comfort.
exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/old-times/Frannie - I think this next one is the review you were talking about on Sunday? Old Times, at Harold Pinter Theatre, review
Rufus Sewell and Kristin Scott Thomas star in a revival of Pinter's deeply unnerving, bafflingly brilliant play, Old Times ****/5  By Tim Auld
12:54PM GMT 06 Feb 2013
It is right that the first Pinter play to be performed at the theatre recently renamed in the late playwright’s honour should be one of his most illusive, not to say deeply baffling.
I’d begun to think that I’d cracked the Pinter code. Not so, it turns out, having tried to mentally karate chop my way through the complexities of Ian Rickson’s new production of Old Times (1971). The king is dead, long live the king, as they say.
It’s not quite a love-triangle, but it is an emotional triangle where three characters – Deeley (Rufus Sewelll), Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Anna (Lia Williams) – vie for emotional power in a claustrophobic room. Or, as any A-level student worth his or her salt knows to ask, do they? And, indeed, are they?
Is this the story of a man spending an evening with his wife and an old friend, trading memories of the past (a theatre-of-menace take on Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold’s duet from Gigi, “I remember it well”)? Or is one of them – indeed two of them, or three of them – dead, and playing and replaying some unresolved crisis from their past lives (as in Samuel Beckett’s Play, where the actors are imprisoned in urns, or a Japanese Noh drama)? Are Kate and Anna two sides of the same person in violent conflict? Who knows? Certainly Pinter had no intention of making it clear.
It’s both frustrating and totally gripping: Kristin Scott Thomas is an alabaster enigma as Kate; Rufus Sewell, brilliantly blokeish, pugilistic and vulnerable as Deeley; and Lia Williams a leggy seductress in a blue coat dress.
On both random and selected nights, Scott Thomas and Williams will swap roles, suggesting that these women may be two figments of Deeley’s imagination in a vexed psychodrama.
It is at once cool, passionate and deeply unnerving, and I’d like to go back again and again until I can work out exactly what’s going on.
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9852606/Old-Times-at-Harold-Pinter-Theatre-review.htmlI love that the play is getting SO many 4 star out of 5 reviews! |
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Post by Petruchio - Good God on Feb 7, 2013 20:28:47 GMT
boah, meanwhile here so many pics - lose the overview on this thread  - thx to everyone for new pics and articles.... YES, GE2 - totally agreed with - really happy too, OT gets so many 4 star out of 5 reviews... absolutely fantastic and amazing!!! Seems, this pic is new...  |
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Post by rueful on Feb 7, 2013 21:37:32 GMT
Thank you for finding and posting these new reviews, GE2! It is wonderful to see how much praise the show and Rufus are getting! Seems, this pic is new... I don't remember seeing it either. That looks like great cap-it material!  Thanks for posting it, PGG! |
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Post by kitty on Feb 7, 2013 23:22:31 GMT
Oh, so it IS a possibility for it to come to NY?! I asked that mostly thinking that's not the way it worked, lol. Here's sending good vibes for it to happen! ;D Wouldn't that be amazing? |
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Post by GreenEyesToo on Feb 8, 2013 0:33:54 GMT
Ooh, nice pic, PGG! Yet more reviews: Review: Old Times
By John Nathan, February 7, 2013
****/5
Apparently, there is good reason to take up the offer to see Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams alternate in the roles of Anna and Kate. It is said that hidden nuances in Pinter’s 1971 play are revealed. I’m not convinced they are worth the price of two tickets but then, I have seen only one version.
I do, however, feel lucky to have seen Scott Thomas in the role of Anne, Kate’s brassy, flirty old friend who visits the married couple and becomes embroiled in the power games played by Kate’s husband, Deeley (Rufus Sewell).
I never thought the relentlessly elegant Scott Thomas had it in her to be so deliciously vulgar. I’m guessing neither did she. Lia Williams, meanwhile, serenely underplays Kate while Sewell’s Deeley is hilariously playful one moment and scarily bullying the next.
But the revelation is Scott Thomas who brings to mind Alison Steadman’s Beverly in Abigail’s Party. Come to think of it, this is a nuance revealed by Ian Rickson’s tense production — that Mike Leigh’s 1977 play could be rooted in Pinter’s.
www.thejc.com/arts/theatre/102285/review-old-timesHarold Pinter’s “Old Times”
Ah yes, I remember it well
A mysterious play about the tricks of memory returns to London
Feb 9th 2013 HAROLD PINTER knew his way around silence. There is something dangerous about quiet on stage, as if it is a gap, an emptiness, a mistake. But Pinter, an English playwright who died in 2008, understood these moments to be the essence of drama, charged and full of reckoning. Speech, on the other hand, was “a constant stratagem to cover nakedness”, he once wrote. In his work the lapses in dialogue can yawn on awkwardly, even oppressively, but they tend to be more expressive than the words.
“Old Times”, a play that premiered in 1971, is full of this electric silence. (Pinter ensured as much, writing “pause” after most lines in the script; though he later rued that this enabled melodrama in the wrong hands.) In a new production at the recently renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in London, directed by the gifted Ian Rickson, the work feels as vital as ever.
At a remote farmhouse on the English seaside, Anna pays an unexpected visit to Kate and her husband Deeley, seemingly to reminisce about all of those adventures they shared in London 20 years ago. But memory can be a funny thing, full of selfish needs and manipulative fictions. These three figures seem to know each other intimately, but it is not clear what history they actually share. Their recollections overlap but also confuse and compete with each other. To heighten the sense that this is a play about the power and frailty of perception, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams switch roles for different performances, though Rufus Sewell stays anchored as Deeley.
“What silence!” declares Anna. “Is it always as silent?” She has just finished rhapsodising about their young, romantic lives in the big city (“Queuing all night, the rain, do you remember?”), only to be greeted by an inhospitable wall of quiet. Anna’s memories are so colourful, so vivacious, but the Kate she describes is nothing like the quietly intense woman on stage. Undeterred, Anna manically lobs yet more memories as if they are weapons. Kate consistently tries to perch on the sofa behind her husband, turning him into a shield. Deeley, meanwhile, is both spectator and provocateur, stoking the evening with his own memories. As the lone man in the room, he enjoys a unique power. He clings to it, sensing that he is always on the verge of being the odd one out.
This is a strange play, puzzling and haunting. It works as well as it does thanks not only to Pinter’s text, but also to superb interpretation on stage. Mr Sewell stomps and sputters as the charismatic and slightly insecure Deeley, though he might be a touch too handsome—his face too chiselled—for the role (Pinter himself played the part in an American production in the 1980s). Ms Williams makes for a nervously effervescent Anna. But it is Ms Scott Thomas who steals the show. Her enormous hooded grey eyes shine and then brood; the drama ricochets off her impressive cheekbones. In either role, she is compelling enough to command even the small gestures, such as when she picks at her toes after a bath, or languorously drapes a foot over a bed. Her silence, far from empty, is seductive and mysterious.
www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21571393-mysterious-play-about-tricks-memory-returns-london-ah-yes-i-remember-it-well? |
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Post by walt on Feb 8, 2013 8:52:25 GMT
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Post by kygal on Feb 8, 2013 11:31:28 GMT
Sending those vibes along with you Kitty.
Had to laugh at that one Walt.
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- thx to everyone for new pics and articles.... 
