There are not three finer actors on Broadway today than Clive Owen, Eve Best, and Kelly Reilly. Won’t someone please give these splendid performers a play that’s vibrant and interesting? Even with the best efforts of director Douglas Hodge to liven things up, Old Times is deathly boring. Although it’s only 65 minutes long, like so many plays by the venerated Harold Pinter, it seems to go on for hours.
Owen, well known as a movie-star hunk, plays Deeley, who lives off in the boonies with his wife, Kate. As played by Reilly, she’s passive and shows little enthusiasm that her old friend Anna, is coming for a visit. Best brings us an Anna who’s so self-possessed, she’s more than a bit scary. In a very short amount of time, the roundelay begins. It seems fairly obvious that while they were roommates, Kate and Anna also shared a romantic relationship. Anna seems to still be carrying a torch for Kate. Realizing that something unexpected is happening, Deeley launches into a story that may or may not be true. It revolves around him looking up Anna’s skirt long ago, and Anna’s welcoming reaction. As in most Pinter plays, the nastiness escalates, while the dialogue makes endless loops around the characters. Old Times is more akin to No Exit than, say, the recently revived The Homecoming, but features many of Pinter’s beloved pauses. Here, Hodge has employed the services of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke for music to work in concert with the old standards which are song by the actors. Flashing spotlights and a brain-dazzling back wall work to take some of the tedium out of the seemingly endless power plays, and, in fact, humor comes refreshingly to the forefront. Harold Pinter is a revered playwright; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Before his death on Christmas Eve in 2008, he wrote 29 plays, 21 screenplays, and directed 27 theater productions. He is nearly as well known for his celebrated lifestyle with his wife, the author Antonia Fraser, and his anti-American pronouncements as he is for his work. As always, audience members must judge for themselves whether or not they are enjoying what they are seeing on stage. But for everyone caught yawning, it’s also okay to to be able to observe that emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.
