[In the following review, Ford asserts that Pinter's Old Times is ultimately an unsuccessful play.]

Old Times, written in 1970, is Harold Pinter's most recessed and uncertain full-length play. It is concerned—like much of his drama—with a triangular relationship, in this case between a man and two women. The characters are all in their early forties. Deeley and Kate are married, and live in a converted farmhouse in the country; here they are visited by Anna, with whom Kate shared a room in London twenty years before. It is the first time they have met since then.

Threesomes obviously appeal to Pinter because they allow him to present our strategies for survival and our attempts at appropriation at their starkest. Deeley recounts how he first met Kate in a cinema showing the film Odd Man Out, starring Robert Newton: “So”, he declares, “it was Robert Newton who brought us together and it is only Robert Newton who can tear us apart.” To which Anna responds: “F. J. McCormick was good too.”

Fear of being the odd man out is at the heart of many of the conflicts Pinter's plays enact, yet at the same time his couples frequently seem almost addicted to the energies and menace embodied in the intruder, and the battle for power he or she initiates. In early Pinter this struggle normally climaxes in an act of violence, but after The Homecoming (1964), his plays begin to inhabit a more nebulous dramatic space, closer to that of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis-clos or Samuel Beckett's half-lit anywhere, in which no action could ever resolve or express the tensions that link the characters.

Old Times's tentativeness may stem in part from Pinter's willingness to accept that the piece might develop in any number of different directions. Whereas his earlier plays unfold with almost imperious confidence, in Old Times Pinter adopts a more kaleidoscopic approach. The play's momentum is circular rather than linear: past and present are confused. The set consists of an armchair and two sofas in the first act, and an armchair and two divans in the second. “The great thing about these beds”, Deeley explains to Anna, “is that they are susceptible to any amount of permutation. They can be separated as they are now. Or placed at right angles, or one can bisect the other, or you can sleep feet to feet, or head to head, or side by side. It's the castors that make all this possible.” The play slides along with similar ease: precise, formally compelling, yet curiously weightless.

Lindy Davies's direction never quite achieves a convincing dramatic focus. Julie Christie, making her West End debut, plays Kate as a bland, good-natured housewife whom it is impossible to connect with the mysterious young woman evoked by Deeley and Anna. Harriet Walter and Leigh Lawson seem more attuned to Pinter's methods—the seeming non sequiturs, the pauses, the exquisitely detailed stories that may or may not be true—but neither performance quite catches fire. The difficulty perhaps lies in the play's disclosure of its own imaginative methods. Anna counters Deeley's description of meeting Kate at the cinema with a story of her own involving a strange man sobbing in an armchair in their room one night, and later lying across Kate's lap. “There are things I remember,” she tells Deeley, “which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.” The remark illustrates the extent to which the play asks to be seen as generating its own plot and context; inevitably, its conclusion has Deeley sobbing in his armchair, then lying across Kate's lap. The action is mirage-like, forever vanishing and re-grouping in the near distance. This conceptual dimension is very much at odds with the actors' determination to squeeze all they can from their roles. Their whole-heartedness tends to violate the play's deepest anxieties—those which derive from the playwright's doubts about the reality of his own creations.