5-H

stage * screen

the plain dealer

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Paula, Pritchett, American fashion model, makes her screen debut in "Adrift," a. film by Jan Kadar opening Wednesday at the Allen.

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january 30, 1972

'Old Times'

gets tribute of silence

N

By Peter Bellamy

Entertainment Editor

EW YORKHarold Pinter's "Old Times" at the

Billy Rose Theater is the best-written and best-acted serious drama on Broadway.

When it comes time for the Tony Award nominations Pinter, director Peter Hall and the cast-consisting of Robert Shaw, Rosemary Harris and Mary Ure-should all be in the running.

Supremely literate, endowed with brilliant characterization and bristling with emotional suspense, it is far and away the most effective drama Pinter has written.

THE MATINEE audience of which I was a part gave it the supreme tribute of dead silence. This in itself is a minor miracle for New York matinee audiences are usually louder than the Tower of Babel.

As is usual with Pinter's plays, the people of “Old Times” are not normal or healthy in mind, but at least in this case they are eminently believable.

Their abrasive conversations and the vengeful joy they take in degrading each other suggest such other plays as "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Five-Finger Exercise.

PINTER IS up to his usual game of teasing the viewer's curiosity almost beyond endurance. His humors are strange, off-beat and sometimes grim. His characters play mordant games with each other even as he plays games with the audience.

They frequently speak in enigmatic riddles and mentally stalk each other, feeling out each other's spiritual weak points. There are

many silences pregnant with hidden meanings. Character is revealed but only to a point. Motives are left obscure, as is some of the imagery.

The play takes place in the present in a luxurious converted farm house in rural England.

There a man and wife of 20 years receive a visit from the wife's former best friend with whom it is made subtly apparent that she once had a lesbian relationship.

THE HUSBAND and friend then wage an obvious but cleverly masked, merciless battle for the wife's affections. Whether the friend is trying to re-establish the lesbian relationship, testing her powers over the wife, or just trying to humiliate the man is never made clear.

Nor is the final resolution of the triangle. One never knows if the wife is silently choosing between her husband and the friend. There is a time when she savagely rejects them both.

At one point the husband explains that he met his wife in a theater while watching Robert Newton in the film "Odd Man Out." His comment is: "Robert Newton brought us together and only Robert Newton can tear us apart."

THE FRIEND then explains that she met the wife even before the husband at a showing of "Odd Man Out," hinting strongly that she can break up the marriage as effectively as Robert Newton. She also tells of the intimate circumstances of seeing the wife's first blush.

"

Robert Shaw, who won an Academy Award nomination as Henry VIII in "A Man for All Seasons, gives a brilliant portrayal of a man made desparate and distraught by a shattering challenge to his basic male ego and the security of his marriage.

He drops cigarette ashes on the floor in his nervousness. His risen voice and his positive statements display a compulsion to demonstrate his virility. His breath control during some long, fast complicated speeches is remarkable.

HIS VOCAL projection and diction are superb. He acts with his face and entire body even during his long periods of silence.

Rosemary Harris is arrestingly articulate, self-confident and sweetly arrogant as the friend who savors every moment of her mental torture of the husband. Her vocal projection and diction are likewise magnificent.

Mary Ure as the wife allows the others to dominate the conversation, suggesting the essentially submissive nature which would let her be a party to both a lesbian affair and a normal marriage.

Miss Ure in real life, incidentally, is Shaw's wife and the mother of their nine children, although one would never know it to look at this attractive blonde.

HALL HAS directed the production with a fast pace and economy of movement. The characters never move except to display despair, triumph or other emotions.

John Bury's lighting, both at the beginning and end of the play, is subdued, indicating dark and murky recesses of the mind. However. for a moment just before the final curtain, the stage is brilliantly illuminated as though to strip the characters of pretense.

"Old Times" lasts only an hour and 15 minutes, with a 20-minute intermission, but it's more than sufficent to register Pinter's great dramatic impact.