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My thoughts on another play.
Mar. 19th, 2013 07:40 pmOnce again we found ourselves dead-center second row about to engage in some the-ay-ture. Thankfully Pinter isn't so splashy. At least not in the physical sense. As everyone months ago had plans to see Book of Mormon (which sounds cool but I wasn't gagging to see it) K. and I talked about seeing a show. I had a look around and saw that Old Times would be playing AND it would be starring Rufus Sewell, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Lia Williams. Rufus Sewell and K. go way back. In her head. (please watch Cold Comfort Farm to understand how this starts.) I understand. Because Rufus Sewell inspires a great swell of emotion in women. Not only is he easy on the eyes, he is a pretty fine actor. I could go into great detail about his filmography but I won't. I will say that I have watched a lot of his stuff.
As for Pinter, I don't have a huge amount of experience with his work. I mean I am familiar with some of his plays, and you say Pinter and theatery people have opinions of all kinds about his work. My Mom admits she never really warmed to him because as a young actor in the 70s, she said that Pinter was major in college and the culture was always telling you, "OMGPINTER! PINTER IS THE GREATEST!" Which hey, he could be but being told repeatedly how great someone is can sometimes leave you a little exhausted and maybe less inclined to examine it. Probably my Mom's feelings influenced my lack of delving into Pinter's work. K. on the other hand is a fan. She has seen a lot of Pinter and has many opinions about his work. Thankfully K. isn't a jerk about her opinions. The other K. also joined us and got a pretty sweet seat at the last minute and I don't think she is intimate with Pinter's work, so we had three different experiences going into this.
I hadn't read many reviews prior to seeing the show, though one friend who had seen it a few weeks prior said it was good, and I trust her taste in many things artistic/theatrical, so I was excited.
We had a potentially good plot, some good theatre, and some mighty fine actors. Let the fun begin!
I was reading the program prior to the show and it talked about how this was the most mysterious of Pinter's plays and after watching it, I thought, "and how." After the play I read some reviews of the show and the reviewer talked about how you get through most of the play and it is like mental karate and you think, "ah ha! I got it! I know what is going on here." And then at the end you are going, "....what just happened? I am not sure about anything." Even K. said that despite having seen the play a few times she still isn't sure what it is about.
And that is pretty much it about "Old Times". (the basic plot being a couple are having an old friend over for dinner and they begin to recall those days of long gone youth.) You start off one place and you begin to go down this one path and you think you get the subtext of things between the three characters and then it gets a little bit murky and you think to yourself, "okay okay... I will just take it in, I am sure this will make sense soon." And instead you keep getting a little bit lost. Not that you can't keep up with the plot but the reality of things becomes so skewed that you have to stop processing it and just accept what is coming at you in hopes that something might connect. But maybe that is the great theme of this play. Along with the idea that memory isn't what we think it is. It's like something my friend S. has talked about over the years, how you can grow up in the same family as someone else and you both have entirely different versions of events and what was really going on at the heart of things. It isn't that one of you is wrong but you have two entirely different sets of context/subtext. Which can be so odd when you try and put them together. You assume there will be a great deal of over-lapping. Sometimes there isn't. And in the case of this play, you think, "okay there will be A, B, and C and then all of a sudden you are given J. I mean where the hell did J. come from???"
It goes from being an equation to being a Dali painting.
It wasn't dull by any stretch of the imagination. The mind was totally engaged and all three actors were fantastic. What is extra exciting/intriguing is that the two women trade parts. We all wished we could have seen the play again just so that we could see if there was another layer or secret that could be revealed from what the actresses brought/knew about either character. Lia Williams as Kate was fantastic because she seemed so contained and fragile but you began to see something greater and darker. There is a line I loved in that play, "she was Bronte in passion but only in secrecy." THAT was her character summed up. Kristin Scott Thomas playing Anna is someone who appears to be forcing her memories on others as a sort of undeniable fact, but as time goes on you begin to see that there are cracks to this. She seems desperate for others to accept her fact. She is beautifully suffocating, yet there are times when Rufus Sewell's Deeley can push back against that. Deeley seems to have the power at first and kind of bats them both about but then there is a shift and he seems more vulnerable. But he doesn't really want to give up the fight but is forced to in the end.
Much like the audience.
God that was such a fun experience. And it has become the joke between the two Ks. and I about Rufus Sewell about how when he was bowing during the curtain call, he was looking directly at us at different moments. Damn he is aging well. He has such beautiful eyes that seem to have a constant sense of merriment about them. Like there isn't time for dullness. It isn't like they are sex eyes (please see Damien Lewis for constant sex eyes.) but they the kind of eyes that appreciate the human form. Yes. That's it. And when it seems like he is looking directly at you, you sort of feel a little giddy. Just ask my friends. They will agree.
We skipped out of the theatre feeling pretty animated and while we didn't die of shock from the cold, we thought about it. Tons of chatter about the show, Rufus Sewell, what we want to see next, the need for a viewing of Cold Comfort Farm (partly so some friends can understand what I mean, when I describe my middle brother in law as being a total Seth in the greater North Cornwall/Devon area.) a hot bath, a book, and sleep. For the next day I had to go back to the countryside after all that culture and humanity.
As for Pinter, I don't have a huge amount of experience with his work. I mean I am familiar with some of his plays, and you say Pinter and theatery people have opinions of all kinds about his work. My Mom admits she never really warmed to him because as a young actor in the 70s, she said that Pinter was major in college and the culture was always telling you, "OMGPINTER! PINTER IS THE GREATEST!" Which hey, he could be but being told repeatedly how great someone is can sometimes leave you a little exhausted and maybe less inclined to examine it. Probably my Mom's feelings influenced my lack of delving into Pinter's work. K. on the other hand is a fan. She has seen a lot of Pinter and has many opinions about his work. Thankfully K. isn't a jerk about her opinions. The other K. also joined us and got a pretty sweet seat at the last minute and I don't think she is intimate with Pinter's work, so we had three different experiences going into this.
I hadn't read many reviews prior to seeing the show, though one friend who had seen it a few weeks prior said it was good, and I trust her taste in many things artistic/theatrical, so I was excited.
We had a potentially good plot, some good theatre, and some mighty fine actors. Let the fun begin!
I was reading the program prior to the show and it talked about how this was the most mysterious of Pinter's plays and after watching it, I thought, "and how." After the play I read some reviews of the show and the reviewer talked about how you get through most of the play and it is like mental karate and you think, "ah ha! I got it! I know what is going on here." And then at the end you are going, "....what just happened? I am not sure about anything." Even K. said that despite having seen the play a few times she still isn't sure what it is about.
And that is pretty much it about "Old Times". (the basic plot being a couple are having an old friend over for dinner and they begin to recall those days of long gone youth.) You start off one place and you begin to go down this one path and you think you get the subtext of things between the three characters and then it gets a little bit murky and you think to yourself, "okay okay... I will just take it in, I am sure this will make sense soon." And instead you keep getting a little bit lost. Not that you can't keep up with the plot but the reality of things becomes so skewed that you have to stop processing it and just accept what is coming at you in hopes that something might connect. But maybe that is the great theme of this play. Along with the idea that memory isn't what we think it is. It's like something my friend S. has talked about over the years, how you can grow up in the same family as someone else and you both have entirely different versions of events and what was really going on at the heart of things. It isn't that one of you is wrong but you have two entirely different sets of context/subtext. Which can be so odd when you try and put them together. You assume there will be a great deal of over-lapping. Sometimes there isn't. And in the case of this play, you think, "okay there will be A, B, and C and then all of a sudden you are given J. I mean where the hell did J. come from???"
It goes from being an equation to being a Dali painting.
It wasn't dull by any stretch of the imagination. The mind was totally engaged and all three actors were fantastic. What is extra exciting/intriguing is that the two women trade parts. We all wished we could have seen the play again just so that we could see if there was another layer or secret that could be revealed from what the actresses brought/knew about either character. Lia Williams as Kate was fantastic because she seemed so contained and fragile but you began to see something greater and darker. There is a line I loved in that play, "she was Bronte in passion but only in secrecy." THAT was her character summed up. Kristin Scott Thomas playing Anna is someone who appears to be forcing her memories on others as a sort of undeniable fact, but as time goes on you begin to see that there are cracks to this. She seems desperate for others to accept her fact. She is beautifully suffocating, yet there are times when Rufus Sewell's Deeley can push back against that. Deeley seems to have the power at first and kind of bats them both about but then there is a shift and he seems more vulnerable. But he doesn't really want to give up the fight but is forced to in the end.
Much like the audience.
God that was such a fun experience. And it has become the joke between the two Ks. and I about Rufus Sewell about how when he was bowing during the curtain call, he was looking directly at us at different moments. Damn he is aging well. He has such beautiful eyes that seem to have a constant sense of merriment about them. Like there isn't time for dullness. It isn't like they are sex eyes (please see Damien Lewis for constant sex eyes.) but they the kind of eyes that appreciate the human form. Yes. That's it. And when it seems like he is looking directly at you, you sort of feel a little giddy. Just ask my friends. They will agree.
We skipped out of the theatre feeling pretty animated and while we didn't die of shock from the cold, we thought about it. Tons of chatter about the show, Rufus Sewell, what we want to see next, the need for a viewing of Cold Comfort Farm (partly so some friends can understand what I mean, when I describe my middle brother in law as being a total Seth in the greater North Cornwall/Devon area.) a hot bath, a book, and sleep. For the next day I had to go back to the countryside after all that culture and humanity.
