Harold Pinter's Old Times

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Last night, I had the privilege of watching two actresses at the height of their powers. Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams mesmerise the audience in Ian Rickson’s pellucid production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. They play the roles of a wife and stranger with such technical purity and emotional sincerity that their performances acquire a balletic quality. This is acting in its most concentrated and distilled form – these actresses are not play acting imaginary characters, rather, they are embracing the opaque quality of what it is to be alive and to love.

The play is based around a ménage a trois, a triangular relationship that shape shifts when the balance of power tips one way or another. Deeley (Rufus Sewell), a successful film director, is the man in the middle. He and his wife, Kate (Lia Williams) are staying in a converted farmhouse when, Anna (Kristin Scott Thomas), one of Kate’s old friend comes to stay. Deeley and Anna both want to claim the introverted Kate as their possession. They vye for her affections. They each claim a special closeness to her. They out manoeuvre and trump each other as they attempt to win the trophy of Kate’s exclusive commitment. But behind their efforts is something creepy and relationally rancid.

Pinter’s play is interested in how our memory of past events shapes and informs the way we live in the present. We always approach the people we know with a store of memories of who they were at different times in the past. Yet, these memories are plastic and unreliable. We manipulate and edit our memories to suit our psychological needs. We never experience memory in a neutral way. “I remember things that may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place,” writes Pinter. The forty-year old characters in the play look back to the bars, clubs and art galleries of their youth as a way of making sense of their present environment. The memories of youthful flirtation and desire are manipulated to excuse the silent terrors of ageing. In the end, Deeley is defeated by his past. He becomes a sobbing wreck before the knowledge of who he was and what he has become. Old Times exposes how memory and power act as an invisible web to so many of our adult relationships

Kristin Scott Thomas is the perfect Pinter temptress. She captures the potent sensuality that some middle aged women possess. They are charged with an eroticism that comes from experience and an unshakeable self-confidence. Kristin Scott Thomas slinks and smooths and stretches like something feline. Yet, we know she also can also flash her claws. Lia Williams, on the other hand, is a master class in buttoned up, corseted rage. She has all the power in this triangular relationship and knows it. But the power is contained, nuclear, and only leaks as she finally turns on Anna and coldly admits, “I remember you. I remember you dead.”

Two great actresses. One actor, admirably holding his own. 80 minutes of gripping, thought provoking theatre. A mysterious Pinter play. Oh and I’ll be back to see if it was as good as I remember it to be.

Old Times by Harold Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London

Betrayal and Kristin Scott Thomas

I read Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in forty five minutes as prep for the new production at London’s Comedy Theatre. On the page, the dialogue looks like mental scratchings. Language pared down to the bare essentials, operating at the outskirts of anything we might commonly recognise as human discourse. Pinter’s tics and pauses carrying the terrifying freight of unspoken meaning. It is in all that is left unsaid or suggested that we complete the picture of ourselves. As Wittgenstein famously put it, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

In Betrayal, communication has been eroded by the failure of human beings to act personally and love faithfully. Infidelity, lies and unspoken knowledge have damaged the channels of human relationships, leaving the participants of this ménage a trois tongue tied by their actions:

Jerry
You’re looking very pretty.
Emma
Really? Thank you. I’m glad to see you.
Jerry
So am I. I mean to see you.
Emma
You think of me sometimes?
Jerry
I think of you sometimes.
Pause
I saw Charlotte the other day.
Emma
No? Where? She didn’t mention it.
Jerry
She didn’t see me. In the street.
Emma
But you haven’t seen her for years.
Jerry
I recognised her.

Betrayal is the perfect play for an actress such as Kristin Scott Thomas. It shows the full range of her remarkable acting ability. She can act below the surface of the words, every subterranean emotion visible in the tiniest vocal inflection or hesitation. Every facial detail or physical gesture signifiers of some pathos at the heart of what it is to be human.

This is not method acting where an actor attempts to psychologically inhabit a character. Instead, this is acting that feels more like a form of possession. Here it is the character that appears to inhabit the soul of the actress. Such acting, bypasses the familiar ways of understanding performance, that is, the action of people pretending to be other people in order to tell a story. The pretence element appears to have almost entirely dissolved, leaving a performance with a crystalline transparency and honesty. Kristin Scott Thomas is a very special actress and acting at the very height of her abilities.

Part of what makes us human is that we are creatures who must communicate. It is not an optional exercise. Discussing the nature of communication, Adam Philips in Monogomy writes, “you cannot be for it or against. You can only do it more or less well – by your own standards or by other people’s – but you can’t not do it.”

In Betrayal, Kristin Scott Thomas’s finely calibrated performance shows how words can mask what we really want or need to say. We are given a real sense that the lies, spoken and unspoken, that surround marital infidelity exist as a cover for our destructive actions. Yet, what we cannot escape, whether it comes to light or not, is the truth about ourselves and our actions.