Kristin at the Harold Pinter Theatre I

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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24 March

I admit that I went to see Old Times, not because of Rufus Sewell, or because of Lia Williams, but Kristin Scott Thomas, who played Emma so beautifully in the same director’s, Ian Rickson’s, production a few years ago (since when The Comedy has become The Harold Pinter Theatre). (Quite apart, even if IMDb ratings disagree, from her striking roles in In Your Hands (2010), Leaving (2009), In Your Hands (2010), The Woman in the Fifth (2011), and I’ve Loved You So Long (2008)*.)

I have seen this play before, and the role of Kate has its difficulties. Moreover, Williams and she have their work cut out by a schedule that has them alternating who will play it, and who her friend Anna, from one performance to another – even, when there is a matinee, within one day, and, on a few days, ‘the actresses playing the roles of Kate and Anna will be decided on the night of the performance with a coin toss’ ! I’m not sure whether it’s gimmickry, but it will have me seeking a time to see KST as Anna.

Anna is the part that Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant**, played – I knew that she had appeared in it, her last of his, but had assumed / misremembered her being Kate – and, to my eye, there are facial similarities between her and KST. (Likewise, I found a still of Pinter appearing in the play as Deeley, and his Kate was Nicola Pagett.) Getting back to the actresses swapping the roles, they obviously aren’t a pair, being mistaken one for the other, in the way of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but it is an interesting thing for the freshness, the dynamics, of the staging to do it.

Talking, before the performance, to some people sitting near me, I explained about how Old Times confuses or blends memory, imagination and reality, and how alliances are tacitly proposed by one to another against the third. However, they shift, so that the characters also employ challenges to each other’s recollection, status, even the words that they use, and sometimes outright intimidate. These skeletal remembrances of my last encounter with the play were to hand, but not, even if it had been wanted, the detail of the unfolding.

Afterwards, waiting at the stage door, I talked to a couple who had not known the play before, but read good reviews, knew some of the films, and wanted to see KST. As we chatted about it, there was a convenient centre-ground that what really happened is down to interpretation***, resulting from my clarifying that the silent tableau acted out at the end is what Anna told us about earlier, with the unknown man in Kate's and her shared room, and his head in Kate's lap, etc.****.

As our discussion progressed, the intriguing suggestion arose that Kate and Anna are perhaps the same person : what if they were, with the visit of Anna as some sort of psychological way of interpreting the things in Kate that Deeley could relate to better, if she took the form of Anna ? The play was first put on in 1971, and Pinter had had that affair with Bakewell in the decade before, so maybe he knew all about, as the case might be, splitting up his affections between two women, or having a publicly visible wife and another with whom he had an unacknowledged intimacy.

If so, I cannot see the situation with Merchant, Pinter and Bakewell, although credited as the origins of the later play Betrayal, being any more than the germ of it or (of Old Times) : this is not Pinter working out his angst and anguish, and actually puts me more in mind of Beckettt’s aptly titled Play, another two women and a man, seemingly being tortured or interrogated about their past. Play was from 1963, and Beckettt and Pinter not only knew each other, but were friends (with a shared love of cricket, too).

The text supports this notion, because, at the close of a long speech towards the end of Act Two, Deeley says (talking to Kate about Anna) :

She thought she was you, said little, so little. Maybe she was you. Maybe it was you, having coffee with me, saying little, so little.


He wants both women, now as then (if there really ever was a then), so much is clear, and there he resembles Man in Play. Beckettt achieves a distillation of the essence of an affair by having the three voices speak parts of each of their story, one at a time and seemingly unaware of the others, literally disembodied (they are in urns), and, in the way that they are presented to us as spirits, compelled for eternity to tell their wrongs, they remind of the Inferno of Dante (beloved of Beckettt). In Pinter’s play, he muses on the uncertainties of memory, of identity, of remembering – or thinking to remember – another person and / or an event, and this production does justice to that aim.

I have already mentioned that Kate is on stage often enough with nothing to do. Scott Thomas did this perfectly, embodying this Kate who gets talked about, and who seems, if not other worldly, sometimes a bit emotionally distant – so much more dramatically stirring the flare-up, when she talks, in several chunks of text separated by silences and pauses, about Anna (who has no further words in the script), seems to gel with this notion that Anna is no more than she, killed off by having Deeley come to her room.

But perhaps Deeley, too, is Anna / Deeley, because Kate first describes Anna :

Your face was dirty. You lay dead, your face scrawled with dirt, all kinds of earnest inscriptions, but unblotted, so that they had run, all over your face, down to your throat.


Then, after a pause marked, in the same speech, she continues addressing Anna, but talks about Deeley :

I dug about in the windowbox, where you had planted our pretty pansies, scooped, filled the bowl, and plastered his face with dirt. He was bemused, aghast, resisted, resisted with force. He would not let me dirty his face, or smudge it, he wouldn’t let me.


The unclean face, the repetition of ‘dirty’ (albeit as a verb), and the vivid reminder of the description of Anna’s in ‘smudge’, they all suggest some link. Anna is said to be ‘lying dead’, with its finality, and Deeley’s response in the immediately succeeding words, proposes a solution to Anna and being in London (the explanation of the apparent opening present day) :

He suggested a wedding instead, and a change of environment.

Slight pause

Neither mattered.


The succeeding, closing words of the play, still from Kate, amount to a denial of Anna’s ever having existed :

He asked me once, about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.


There has been a fair amount of barbed comment from Deeley to her, such as this exchange (about Anna’s possibly fanciful claims regarding her home and husband) :

Anna : He’s not a vegetarian. In fact he’s something of a gourmet. We live in a rather fine villa and have done so for many years. It’s very high up, on the cliffs.

Deeley : You eat well up there, eh ?

Anna : I would say so, yes.


Kate related (if Anna weren’t the side of Kate that she killed to become Deeley’s wife) Anna being dead, then, in almost magically-sounding way abouttaking Deeley to where she lived, ‘When I brought him into the room your body of course had gone’, then putting on his face, and his proposal : Deeley has substituted for / become Anna.

Seen from his perspective, the closing tableau of a sobbing Deeley, seeking attention or comfort from the women in turn, then, as Kate sits on her bed and Anna lies on hers, sitting in the armchair embodies a possible, but difficult, choice between the quiet Kate, who likes to go for walks, and the Anna who says (again, not convincingly) that she likes parties, the Tate and concerts.

As if as a provocation to Deeley, who claims to have been watching a film in an empty cinema in when he first saw Kate and spoke to her outside, Anna asserts that Kate hustled her out to ‘some totally unfamiliar district and, almost alone, saw a wonderful film called Odd Man Out’(the same film). After these words, a silence is marked, and then Deeley abruptly says ‘Yes, I do quite a bit of travelling in my job’, which Sewell reinforced by an angry look at Anna and tone.

We will never know what is going on amongst this apparent three any more than they, if they are three, do themselves, or what Deeley’s job and travelling are really about. As with all good art, what matters is how this play makes us think about what we see, remembering what Anna said :

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.


Three slight hesitations with the performance. First, when Deeley takes a second brandy, what Sewell is (meant to be) doing with his gyrations across the sofa on which Anna is sitting from behind it was beyond me. Later, I felt that he allowed the pace to go a little too slack in, I think, the long speech where he confuses the women, or in a sustained exchange with one of the others, when he is centre stage. And, finally, there is supposed to be a long silence, after lying across Kate’s lap, and before very slowly sitting up (the sitting up was not slow either), but that may be Rickson’s direction.


Now on the blog : when KST played Anna instead


End-notes

* I throw a veil over Bel Ami (2012), not because KST isn’t good, but because she had been miscast as an older woman, who, through childlike desire and infatuation, gains a glow of someone more the real age of the actress.

** Curiously, to judge from the write-up of Pinter in the back pages of the programme, you’d have thought that he lived with Antonia Fraser for a while before marrying her, not that he’d already been married and a father, let alone had an affair with Joan Bakewell…

*** Perhaps one of the starting-points for Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, precisely about interpretation, with (in the production that I saw) another three characters, Nils Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg, circling each other - and their relationships - like particles in an atom.

**** That speech, in context, shows what I first thought about the play when I read it, because there are pages of script leading up this point when just Deeley and Anna are talking (usually about Kate), and some stage business is needed for the listening Kate. (Between them, Rickson and Scott Thomas (and, no doubt, Williams) did this immensely well.) As she remarks, it’s almost as if she is dead or cannot hear them, an intensified form of what happens – as here – when some long-lost friend of one partner is being asked by the other what he or she was like then.


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