Old Times by Harold Pinter

- Characters and themes-

I will now tell you something about characters in this play. There are three of them, and their names are Deeley, Kate and Anne. All of them are in their forties. Deeley and Kate are married couple, and Anna is a friend of Kate, who is coming to visit them. In the beginning all three characters are on the stage, but light is only on two of them. Deeley and Kate are talking about Anna, while they are expecting her arrival. Anna is an old friend of Kate, they were roommates in London, and she is Kates only friend. The play begins with Kate and Deeley smoking cigarettes and discussing Kate's old friend Anna. Kate says that Anna was her only friend, but Anna had many friends. Deeley says he's never met Anna, and he is surprised to hear that Kate and Anna were roommates 20 years ago and he is very curious to met her. Kate says that Anna occasionally stole her underwear.In the next scene Anne arrives and three of them are talking, and she and Deeley are singing songs such as They cannot take that away from me and Smoke gets in your Eyes" which reinforce the plays basic theme of remembrance.Words, and the memories that words define, are the ammunition in this duel, and reality - along with space and time. Deeley says he first met Kate at the movieOdd Man Out, when she was the only other person in the cinema, but Anna explains later that she and Kate sawOdd Man Outtogether. And there are hints that as young secretaries in London, Kate and Anna may have been lovers.One of Pinter's key points is that memory is flexible, so who first took Kate to the cinema to seeOdd Man Outbecomes a vital part of the battle between Deeley and Anna. But the final triumph, belongs to Kate, who defies all attempts at occupation and remains resolutely herself and she seems to wake up from her passivity in the end. The last scene bright lights on the three sitting separately locked in their solitude.While Kate is in the bathroom, Deeley confronts Anna, telling her that he's met her before, at one party. He says she used to dress in black and get men to buy her drinks, and he fell for it, buying her a drink 20 years ago and going with her to party. They sat across the room from each other, and he looked up her skirt. A girl sat beside her and they talked, while Deeley was surrounded by men and lost track of the girls. When he got through the crowd to the couch where the girls had sat, they were gone.These are two key events in the play, the cinema showing, and the party: In Deeleys mind, only Kate was present at the showing of the movie Odd Man Out; only Anna was there at that fateful Westbourne Grove party. We dont know the actual facts of the matter, because the two womens memories can be as unreliable as Deeleys, but we get the strong impression that he has reshaped these events to suit himself.

Kate, who is a dreamer, imagines seeing Anna dead, and yells at her I remember you dead. She has a memory of Anna in their old flat lying lifeless with dirt covering her face. She knows that Anna didnt really dieshe is standing there before her, fully alivebut she still experiences it as a memory. This is not a hallucination or a sign of mental disorder, it is called nonbelieved memory: memories for events that we no longer believe actually happened. These rememberers know, rationally, that the events could not have happened, but they still unfold in their minds just like a memory would.Remembering is not something we do alone. For the characters inOld Times, negotiating an account of the past is very dangerous process. Memories can be weapons as well as instruments of persuasion. There are many different interpretations, and explanations about this play. Critics suggest that perhaps the action takes place in one of the character's minds, or perhaps one of them is dead, or perhaps Anna and Kate are the same person, two aspects of the same woman.

Main themes in this play:There are so many different things that Pinter deals with in this play.The play is mostly about how past is created as weapon of psychological domination.The past is the present in this play.But it also deals with the element of time, space and related concept of memory of distant past. The play attempts to capture the past, and to recreate the effect of the past on the present through memory lane."There are some things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place. Pinter might be using this line to comment on the main theme of the play, the way in which people remember the same incidents differently. On the other hand, he might be commenting on the non-communication between people. Each of the characters lives in his own world, only perceiving what he wants so that his world can survive.The play deals with the way in which three different people remember the same series of events. By the time each finishes recalling them, it is uncertain if they happened or not. For the characters, however, these events happened the way that each one remembers. Pinter points out that everyone can remember the past, but, because all perceive it differently, each person will remember it differently.By using the elements of expressionism he provided a dream quality that makes the viewer wonder if the play's action is reality or a dream. He uses the quality of the story to make the viewer perceive that this is not a dream but a nightmare. He leaves it as an open question, whether this is a dream or nightmare. By giving Old Times dream qualities one wonders if the action is reality or perhaps all that happens is part of someone's memory.There are many interpretations that can be applied to this play. When asked what Old Times was about, Harold Pinter himself said, "It happens, it all happens." He tells so much, yet nothing ,at the same time. Pinter does so in order to make the director, the actors, and ultimately the audience think.