Memories As Weapons

By Christopher Portertield

All of Harold Pinter's plays can be viewed as attempts to write the same play. Each new work appears to be another approximation of some Platonic ideal in which Pinter yearns finally to reduce a few characteristic themes and methods to their purest state, finally to narrow his focus to a vision of life in its quiddity. In these terms, Old Times, which opened last week in London, may be his nearest miss yet.

The plot encapsulates the basic Pinter situation. Two people are together, in this case a documentary film maker and his wife of 20 years, who live in a remote farmhouse. They are joined by a third person who has ties to the past of one of them--a woman with whom the wife lived during her days as a secretary in London. As usual with Pinter, the surface is unremittingly mundane. Coffee is poured, snatches of old songs are sung, memories are exchanged. Also as usual, the action is punctuated by pregnant pauses, the lines surrounded by halos of significant silence. Deeper emotions are hinted at: the lingering spell of the visitor's lesbian attachment to the wife, the husband's sense of being threatened by the woman's arrival, the wife's sublime and ultimately frightening impassivity before love.

Calculated Precisely. All of this may strike some playgoers as merely another Pinter puzzle, and a rather dehydrated one at that. But in fact it is a virtuoso display of how subtle, gripping and revealing a drama can be , J fashioned from such spare materials. Fixed with Pinter's almost hallucinatory concentration and clarity, every word and gesture has its measured weight and effect. The climaxes are restrained, yet so precisely calculated--as when the two women suddenly lapse into speaking with each other as if they were roommates again--that the impact can be shattering.

Pinter is not out to anatomize nostalgia or even to strip it naked, but to show how people use memories as weapons. The woman visitor and the husband vie with each other to possess the wife by possessing her past. In the process they ruthlessly select and reshape "old times," casting each other in roles to suit their own purposes. Did the woman or the husband introduce the wife to the movie Odd Man Out! Did the husband once meet the woman in a pub and go to a party with her where he gazed up her skirt? The answers do not matter, only the assertions. "There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened," says the woman. "There are things I remember which may never have happened, but as I recall them, so they take place."

Victorious But Frustrated. Directed by Peter Hall and designed by John Bury, the Royal Shakespeare Company's production is impeccable. Vivien Merchant (Mrs. Harold Pinter), who is to Pinter's plays what Clara Schumann was to her husband's music, plays the woman with a mixture of hauteur and girlish romanticism. She makes the character both menacing and slightly spurious. Colin Blakely is blessedly funny and touching as the bluff husband whose male pride is aroused but baffled. He is apparently victorious but eventually frustrated. In the role of the mysterious wife, Dorothy Tutin catches the unconscious cruelty of an indifference that can take anything but give nothing.

If Old Times almost perfectly crystallizes Pinter's dramaturgy, is it therefore his best play? That probably depends on how one feels about the direction of his career. Pinter's growth has been a spiral turning inward rather than outward. The question is how far he can pursue his ideal at the center before he meets himself coming back. It has always been part of his artistic courage to pitch his plays at the limits of the minimal and rarefied, and part of his importance is that he can make them work. For all its brilliance, Old Times does seem about as minimal and rarefied as a play can be before sterility or self-parody sets in. But then, that is what they said about The Caretaker more than a decade--and many rings of the spiral--ago.

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