Old Times

“You cheerfully break every rule of the theatre that I was brought up to believe in,” Noël Coward once wrote to a young Harold Pinter, “except the cardinal one of never boring for a split-second.” Coward didn’t always hold as generous a view of experimental theater (from another of his letters: “Personally I would rather play Bingo every night for a year than pay a return visit to Waiting for Godot”), but it’s not entirely surprising he would find something fascinating about Pinter. After all, the chief mode of expression for both playwrights is a kind of elevated chitchat. The difference is that, where Coward festoons seemingly casual conversation with glittering bons mots, Pinter imbues it with a pervasive malice.

In Pinter’s Old Times—now playing in repertory with Coward’s Private Lives at City Lit so you can compare and contrast for yourself—the dramatist uses his deceptive small talk to turn a banal reunion of old friends into an increasingly unsettling turf war. When married couple Deeley and Kate receive a visit from Kate’s former roommate Anna, an evening of sublimated hostility follows that’s so tense it would be unbearable if it weren’t so gripping.

McCabe’s staging has its uncertain moments—particularly in the hazy performance of DeFrancesco as Kate—but when Bender and Feagin get cracking as Deeley and Anna, the production manages to capture a crucial aspect of Pinter’s pull: the feeling that something mysterious and probably malevolent is taking its course, just under the surface.

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