Harold Pinter’s plays challenge us to make sense of them. They always leave empty spaces that we are compelled to fill. Such is clearly the case with Old Times, the Pinter play currently at The Midnight Company. It has three characters, which always presents that challenge of how do you arrange things, two against one, one against two, sides shifting. As the title points out, the play is about old times, the past, what we remember of it. Pinter said, “The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.” 

Kate and Deeley are married. They are being visited by an old friend Anna, with whom Kate once shared an apartment, twenty years ago. All three are now in their forties. Deeley says he has never before met Anna. Later, when Kate is taking a bath, Deeley says he had known Anna, twenty years ago, and went to a party with her. Anna claims not to know what he is talking about. When Kate returns, she has little to say, but Anna and Deeley almost seem to be competing for her attention. Kate doesn’t confirm the stories of either Anna or Deeley about what happened twenty years ago, but she does say to Anna, “I remember you dead.” 

What was that about?

As happens with Pinter, people try to answer the question, all the questions, even suggesting that Kate and Anna are different personalities of the same person. 

Why not?

Why?

Another Pinter comment: “A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”

An actor has to decide what the truth of a character is and how to play that truth, even if it is false.

Such is done very well by director Sarah Lynne Holt and the three actors at Midnight. 

Joe Hanrahan as Deeley is in the minority,  and we can see him struggling to find a way to defend his masculinity, not always successfully. Kelly Howe’s Anna is a guest, watching her step sometimes, perhaps hoping to restore the relationship she once had with Kate. Keep an eye on Colleen Backer’s Kate. She knows the other two are competing for her. She likes that. But should she let them know she likes that? Backer plays it all beautifully; so much is going on with Kate, so much Backer shows us, so much she doesn’t show us. It is all very smartly done and clearly performed. 

Lucy Bowe is the Midnight Company’s Stage Manager. Chuck Winning designed the very compact two sets in the Chapel. Tony Anselmo did the lighting, Kayla Dressman the costumes, and Liz Henning is the Production Manager.

So another Pinter puzzle to keep our brains spinning.

—Bob Wilcox

Photo by Joey Rumpell
From the left, Kelly Howe, Colleen Backer, and Joe Hanrahan in Old Times.