Pinter's Old Times: The Memory Game

Pinter's Old Times: The Memory Game STEPHEN MARTINEAU • "WELL, WELL, AND THEY DIDNT EVEN TAKE THEIR CLOTHES OFF!" As the curtain closed on a performance of Pinter's Old Times at Guildford,l this was the first response that floated over to me across the auditorium. The tone was bewildered and somewhat aggrieved and, to a point, one could sympathize: there were two beds all ready, a mood of intense desire, and any number of sexual variations that had been suggested as a possible resolution to the situation. Yet the final tableau presented one woman lying stretched out on one bed, fully clothed; another woman sitting buddha-like on another bed, fully clothed; and one man sitting slumped and bowed over an armchair. In fact the remark pointed to more than taking off clothes; it raised the essential question of the play - what was it that had kept the audience in rapt attention for one and a half hours? In the bewilderment was a demand for some kind of certainty of action, but the play offered neither certainty nor action; only three people talking and disagreeing about their past in post-war London. This past was a time when Kate and Anna seemingly shared a flat together; when Kate and Deeley seemingly met for the first time; when Deeley met Anna at the Wayfarer's Tavern just off the Brompton Road - or was it at a party in Westbourne Grove? Or both? One of the few things that the three of them seem to agree about is seeing Carol Reed's mm, Odd Man Out, in a fleapit in some obscure neighbourhood of London; but whether Deeley met Kate there at one time or Anna went there with Kate at another, or whether these two times were one time is really another matter altogether. There is only one brief moment of physical contact throughout the whole play, and hardly sufficient energy can be raised even to get up from a comfortable armchair or sofa. One thinks back to the game of blind man's buff in The Birthday Party, to Mick pouncing on Davies in The Caretaker, 287 288 STEPHEN MARTINEAU and, in The Homecoming, to Max's flailing stick or Ruth rolling on and off the couch with Joey. No such excitement here, not even the volume or arrogance of voice, the verbal histrionics of Pinter's earlier plays. But if.Old Times is all talk and uncertainty, it surely takes its toll. Incomplete and insecure as all three characters are at the outset, the play traces a horrifying process of disintegration, showing that Pinter, by this time, has conceived of another brand of violence, needing neither sticks nor verbal fireworks, nor even the physical certainty of the present to take on dramatic force. 2 But it is moving ahead too fast to talk of destruction so early. If, in his latest play, Pinter is moving away from immediate physical action, he has retained every ounce of his humour. The play, at the outset, is above all remarkably funny, and this observation begs another vital question. If one is forced to ask what is so strikingly dramatic about the play when there is so much talk and so little action, one is at the same time prompted to consider the relationship between laughter and destruction. These two questions are one. Consider the first visit to the fleapit playing Odd Man Out as told by Deeley: What happened to me was this. I popped into a fleapit to see Odd Man Out. Some bloody awful summer afternoon, walking in no direction. I remember thinking there was something familiar about the neighbourhood and suddenly recalled that it was in this very neighbourhood that my father bought me my first tricycle, the only tricycle in fact I ever possessed. Anyway, there was the bicycle shop and there was this fleapit showing Odd Man Out and there were two usherettes standing in the foyer and one of them was stroking her breasts and the other one was saying 'dirty bitch' and the one stroking her breasts was saying 'mmnnn' with a very sensual relish and smiling at her fellow usherette, so I...