Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
With the production of Harold Pinter's 'Old Times' entering it's production week, the cast and production team of the show share their thoughts with Catherine Bennett on Pinter, performance and portrayal.
Questions for the Director (Jonathan Kerridge-Phipps)
So, first of all: why Old Times?
When Pinter is done in the West End, what tends to be done are his earlier plays – you get a whole series of Caretakers, Birthday Party’s, even the Homecoming. What are called his ‘memory plays’, ones that he wrote in the middle of his career, aren’t done very often. I’m interested in generating for the audience a side of Pinter that they may not have seen before. There’s something avant garde about Old Times that I wanted to get to grips with.
Harold Pinter has such an iconoclastic writing style. He’s famous for his long pauses, rhetorical questions, illogic and non-sequiturs. Do you find Pinter a challenge to direct?
Harold Pinter is part of a group of playwrights that have been canonised. There is a received knowledge of what they did, an awkward consensus on how they should be done. In the past, Pinter has been done very badly. The poetic diction of his writing really stands out as a playwriting style, but it has lent itself to vain, stilted performances. The challenge for me was how to animate the text, but still stay true to Pinter’s writing style.
There are many different interpretations of the play. Do you think it’s important for the audience to leave the theatre with their own theory of what happened, or do you like to play up the ambiguity? Did you direct with a particular meaning in mind?
There are dozens of different interpretations. Michael Billington [a prominent biographer of Pinter] hit the nail on the head really when he said that Old Times works on several levels. For me, the crux of the play is to retain the different levels of ambiguity and not close any of them off. It’s liberating for the audience because they are forced to think for themselves. In the early stages of the rehearsal process we did a lot of brainstorming – watching documentaries and reading up on the basic interpretations of the play. It’s interesting to note that Pinter himself was very distrustful of theory. When critics asked him after a play, ‘What happened?’, he would respond with, ‘Everything happened’. And this is true: it is such an open play; there is so much to be done with it. But it also applies in the sense that actually nothing happens – Pinter is commenting on the grand illusion of theatre.
Have you seen any other productions of Old Times? How have previous productions of Pinter changed or affirmed for you your own image of the play?
I haven’t seen any other productions of it, but that’s what I liked about it. I have no received ideas about how it ought to be done, although there is extensive reading material on the subject. I have wanted to put it on ever since I first read it.
Do you think Pinter is a comedian?
Yes – Pinter is hilarious. The problem with Pinter is that if you pay too much lip service to the poetry of his writing, you lose the comedy. Performances of his work are often characterised by too much of a sense of foreboding on stage. It’s important to bring out the lightness of the text in order to make the bleaker scenes have their full effect.
Old Times has been called one of Pinter’s ‘memory plays’. What do you take to be meant by that term and has it influenced your directing?
I think that one of Anna’s lines in the play is an appropriate tagline: “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened”. Essentially, the conflict in the play is unverifiable . Everything is loaded; everything said is an accusation. The actors need to play up the subtext. Otherwise Engaged [a play by Simon Gray that Kerridge-Phipps directed in the winter term, 2009] was naturalistic. In Pinter there is no small talk; everything is an indirect attack.
When reading it, I noticed that Old Times is quite a static play. All of the action occurs in one room. Did you find this hard to stage and were you worried about losing the audience’s attention? There are two sets in the play, one for each act: the living room and the bedroom. The different sets mirror each other. Actually, I liked the stillness of the play because it emphasises the nuances of Pinter’s language. It’s harder work for the actor, as there’s less stuff on stage to play with. The text predominates stillness over movement, and I’ve tried to show this through the proxemics of the characters. At the beginning of the play, the characters are equidistant from each other. During the play, of course the actors touch each other, move around etc, but then the play ends as it began, with that same equidistance between them all. Pinter is highlighting how they are unknowable to each other, and that is the essential pessimism of the play.
So EVERY ‘man is an island’?
Yes - the play is in direct opposition to John Donne, showing that no one can ever really understand another person. Pinter displays an inherent cynicism about human relationships.
Questions for the Cast (Sam Hinton, Serena Manteghi and Georgia Bird)
All of your characters are 40 years old. Did you find that difficult to portray? Were you worried you wouldn’t be believable?
SH: I normally play characters around 40 years old, so it’s not a new thing for me. SM: Me neither; I’m used to playing an older age range in Drama Barn plays. Of course, there’s a kind of contract set up with the audience – obviously we’re students, it’s a Drama Soc play, so there’s some leeway there. GB: I often play young characters, so it’s a challenging role for me. You have to think about physicality in a whole new way. SM: Sam has been cultivating his ‘old man’ persona for some years now anyway!
How do you interpret the play? Do the many different theories affect the way you portray your characters?
SH: I think you need an awareness of all of the hypotheses surrounding a play in order to pull off the nuances in the text. But you don’t want to make it an essay rather than a performance. SM: None of the theories actually check out completely anyway. There are always loopholes - you have to keep it open for the audience.
Michael Billington wrote that Pinter, having grown up in wartime Britain, was affected by the mood of that time. As a result, his plays are imbued with a sense that everything could end tomorrow, a kind of sexual desperation. Do you see that in your characters?
SM: Well, the level of eroticism in the play, the sexual tension, is just another form of manipulation. GB: The play does get more desperate as it goes on. SM: It’s about waning marriage - SH: - About saying one thing and meaning another. There definitely is a post-war desperation there. People began to see marriage as an imperfect institution.
Some saw Pinter’s attitude to women as misogynistic, exploitative. Others say Pinter is a feminist, displaying the power and resilience of women. How do you view the female characters of the play – are they weak or strong?
SM: It’s a misunderstanding to characterise either female character like that. It’s not realism, it’s a kind of heightened realism – of course the characters have attributes in both of those columns. GB: I think Kate, more than Anna, has that inner power and resolve. Anna is more manipulative. SH: I think Pinter provides equal treatment of both male and female characters. There’s a sense of internal control with both, but it’s a different control in Deeley from Kate’s control.
Old Times was written before Pinter’s marriage to Vivien Merchant officially dissolved, but he’d been having affairs long before 1971, when the play was first performed. Does the play show a cynicism about marriage?
SH: One of the theories about the play is that Kate and Anna represent the same person, and Anna is the younger version. So when you marry one woman, it won’t be the same woman you are married to years later because people change as they get older. My character, Deeley, sees the old Kate in Anna, and then sees her as she is now. There’s a disappointment there. SM: For Deeley, it’s a play about marriage, and for Kate it is just about two relationships in her life. It just shows that no matter what you do, you are always essentially alone. Even if you get married you don’t share everything of yourself. GB: Anna tries to get into that marriage and break it apart. Both she and Deeley try to claim ownership of Kate – that’s not an optimistic view of marriage.
The tension between all of the characters creates a sexual triangle. There is some indication in the play, and it has been suggested by critics, that the relationship between Kate and Anna is more than just friendship… How are you choosing to interpret that?
SM: The sexual tension between the characters is an explanation for their actions throughout the play. Both Deeley and Anna use their sexuality as a way of controlling Kate. GB: We’re not going down the road of a lesbian relationship… SM: Although maybe Anna would have tried it on! GB: Anna uses it as a power tool. The references to sex in the script are just superficial. There’s no actual romance there.
Many of Pinter’s plays can be characterised by the power struggles going on within them. In Old Times, who do you think holds the power?
GB: Me! Well – SM: It shifts throughout the play. SH: Ultimately, Kate does, I think. SM: Perhaps if the play carried on for another hour, the balance of power might change again. SH: It’s like Kate is the parent and we’re the children. And she is the one in control of the lollipop! She is actually reverse -manipulating us, by taking away the lollipop when she wants.
Old Times is playing at 41 Monkgate, from Thursday 17th to Saturday 19th June
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