Wellington Oracle

– photo by Richard Ellis

Would it be a pointless tautology, especially in light of Pinter’s own discomfort with the term, to call Third Wall Theatre’s production of Old Times Pinteresque?’

Pinter once famously distinguished between two kinds of silence, one characterized by the absence of speech and one characterized by its obscuring presence, and what makes director James Richardson’s staging Pinteresque is its power to make both kinds of silence speak… with startling force.

The play relentlessly interrogates the relationship between recollection and invention, history and authority. It features only three characters – the married couple Deeley and Kate, and their dinner-guest Anna, and each is persuasively acted (by Richard Gelinas, Kristina Watt and Sophie Goulet respectively). In a couple of instances during Friday night’s performance, both Watts and Goulet fumbled the delivery of their lines, but both recovered adeptly, Goulet in particular able to weave her halting speech into Anna’s mercurial characterization.

That Kate and Deeley are recalled as having met during a screening of The Odd Man Out becomes a summation of the relationship between the three, as during every conversation one of the characters is portrayed as being on the outside, banished from the communicative circle, and it is this imbalanced dynamic that produces some the play’s funniest and most unnerving moments.

The set, designed by Sarah Waghorn, is minimal but evocative; the simple furnishings suggest something provisional and tenuous about the uncomfortably shared world of the three characters. The 12-paneled backdrop, functioning like a large picture window, is a clichéd pastoral seaside scene which visualizes the play’s themes, as the window, a surface as transparent as we’d like memory to be, is in reality a fixed image, translucent at best, if not entirely opaque.

Rebecca Miller’s lighting design is inventive, and its shifts support the tensely unfolding exchanges well. In one appropriately obtrusive moment, Anna’s “arrival” (the actress has been standing onstage, her back to the audience, the entire time) is punctuated by a bright flash, triggering the exuberantly vacuous speech Anna produces as she leads Kate down one of the play’s labyrinthine memory lanes, recalling their distantly glittering girlhood together as “innocent secretaries” in London.

But it is the treatment of the scripted silences, the ’Pinter pauses’ that the playwright himself would come to question in later life, that most impressed me. Rather than seeming melodramatically portentous, these pauses become occasions for a silent speech of bodies more communicative than the words which sandwich them. Each of the actors has strikingly developed posture, facial expression, and habitual mannerism in allowing these moments to speak (examples include Deeley’s spasmodic brandy snifting, Anna’s audience-inclusive gaze and Kate’s disassociative stare, which brilliantly literalizes her remark that her “head is quite fixed” against Deeley’s claim that it drifts when he doesn’t hold it in his hands).

There is a strong current of verbal violence in Pinter’s play that is powerfully realized by this production, and this informs my recommendation: do yourself a favour and see Third Wall Theatre’s adaptation of Old Times…and enjoy the silence.

(On a more personal note, I am going to stop referring to those darkly pregnant pauses during casual conversation that seem revelatory of some indefinite significance as “Lynchian,” in an effort to reinstate the undervalued term Pinteresque, which now has new resonance for me.)

Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” produced by Third Wall Theatre and directed by James Richardson plays the studio theatre of the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre through October 3; for tickets call the GCTC Box Office at 613 236 5196