Play House's 'Old Times'

Gets Breathless Silence

By Peter Bellamy

"Old Times," the first of two Harold Pinter plays to be presented in rotation at the Play House Brooks Theater, is a good example of the different approaches of the stage and the films.

When the screen builds a mood of mounting emotional tension, it employs words, acting, physical action, music, sound effects, and quite often changes of scene. It almost invariably lets you know exactly what has gone on.

In "Old Times" there is almost no physical action, no sound effects, no offstage music and no change of scene. But like Edgar Allen Poe, Pinter uses words and the power of suggestion to plunge you into a mood of foreboding the movies can seldom duplicate.

HE CHALLENGES the imagination in that he never lets you know exactly what is happening. But in "Old Times" he offers two possibilities, each of them logical, but teasingly never definitive.

Pinter's appeal is intellectual and emotional and not for those who want a lot of action and laughter.

The drama simply wouldn't work, however, unless it had direction and performers of the highest sensitivity and skill. As it is, it is received by the audience in breathless silence.

One explanation of the play's story is that it is the no-holds-barred struggle between a lesbian and a husband for control of the body and soul of the latter's wife. Another is that the wife and her best female friend are two aspects of the same personality.

THE TIME is the present. The place is

the master bedroom of a converted farmhouse in England. The situation would seem to involve the husband's presence at the first reunion of his wife and her best female friend after a separation of 20

years.

The two women appear to share tantalizing, intimate secrets to which the husband is not a party. The woman friend at previously, but later supplies details of first denies ever having met the husband their introduction. There are hints of forbidden pleasures.

Edmund Lyndeck, as the husband, is a completely polished actor, with a magnificent voice, presence, diction and movement. His rage and heartbreak at the thought that his wife is a lesbian is out of life.

MYRNA KAYE, usually seen in bouncy comic roles, gives the wife the enigmatic quality of the Sphinx and the smile of the Mona Lisa. She is submissive and pliant and at the same time as sensuous as a sleepy cat. She also has spiritual claws.

Jo Farwell, as the wife's best friend, is an intriguing mystery whose character could be either lesbian or the other half of the wife's personality. Certain it is that she almost purrs with ecstasy when she demeans or insults the husband.

Director Evie McElroy has directed the play in such a manner that the chance that the wife and her best friend are a split personality is more believable.

The lighting by Barbara Leatherman and John Rolland illumines the dark corners of the drama's black moods and at the end seems to strip its souls naked for a second.