Is Memory a Cat or a Mouse?

When an army retreats, some will say that it is regrouping in an impregnable position. When the stock market plummets, some will say that it is testing a support level. When a playwright falls flat on his face, some will say that he is exploring a new frontier of drama. An agile use of the vocabulary of retrieval frequently snatches illusory success from palpable failure.

Harold Pinter has not fallen on his face in Old Times, but he has mistaken a dead end for a new road. Even more surprisingly, he has written a play that is a bit of a bore, though the bulk of the reviews have been favorable.* It is a three-character play. Deeley (Robert Shaw) and Kate (Mary Ure) are husband and wife. They await the visit of Anna (Rosemary Harris), Kate's friend and roommate of 20 years before. She appears, and the three begin a cat-and-mouse game with memory.

Delphic Questions. Several things are suggested; none is certain. Kate and Anna may have had a lesbian relationship. Deeley may once have known Anna beyond the voyeuristic intimacy of looking up her white thighs at a party. Did Deeley or Kate go with Anna to the film Odd Man Out'? Delphic questions--Delphic answers, scattered clues to nowhere except perhaps the murky recesses of the subconscious mind.

Unfortunately, one could scarcely care less about this flaccid trio. The blood of life does not pump through them. They are reveries and idle speculations posing as people. Dramatically, the uses of the past are betrayed in Old Times. At the end of the play, nothing about the past has been clarified or illuminated. Nor has what Eliot called "the present moment of the past" been reclaimed. It is the reclamation of the past as present vision that accounts for the power and poignancy of such plays as Long Day's Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman.

Masked Anemia. It is very difficult to account for Pinter's writing such a lethargic play. Of all contemporary playwrights, he has taught us the most about the importance of imminence in the dramatic experience. Who will come, or break, through the door next? What devastating words will unexpectedly be uttered? That is what has made Pinter an edge-of-the-seat dramatist. Even when he was, as English Critic Alan Brien once said, "a Hitchcock with the last reel missing," he still provided the electric Hitchcock tension. Beginning with the one-acters, Landscape and Silence, Pinter became enamored of static ruminative monologues that belong more properly to the novel than to drama.

In Old Times, his famous pauses seem to be toothless gaps in the text. They indicate not minds and hearts too full for words, but too empty and too weary to go on. The actors mask the play's anemia beautifully. Rosemary Harris' Anna, in particular, is a remarkable achievement, with its Sapphic intricacies and paradoxically cool eroticism. Similarly, Peter Hall's direction is impeccable, and he has imbued the inaction of the evening with a rich golden stillness that the words themselves do not fully convey. The words, as always in Pinter, are rationed, unadorned and precise. They are also a trifle plaintive and petulant, as if Pinter were suffering a teary bout of middle-aged tristesse.

*Including an approving notice of the London production by TIME'S Christopher Porterfield (TIME, June 14).

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