London Theater Journal: Memory Plays

Simon Annand Rufus Sewell and Kristin Scott Thomas in “Old Times.”

LONDON -One thing, at least, is certain in both the fascinating new versions of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” that are keeping audiences in a rapt state of perplexity here: The man loses.

Admittedly, he loses in two very different ways, even though he is played by the same actor, a marvelous Rufus Sewell. But there’s no doubt that by the end of the matinee and evening performances I saw on Saturday, he was a thoroughly defeated soul.

As for the victor, well, it’s the wife, not the other woman - isn’t it â€" whether she is played (with such tantalizing dissimilarities) by Kristin Scott Thomas or Lia Williams. Yes, I’d say that the eal power definitely lies with the wife. Oh, scratch that “definitely,” and scratch “real,” too. We are discussing a Pinter play.

I assure that you will long continue that discussion, even if only in your mind, if you’re lucky enough to see Ian Rickson’s productions of “Old Times” â€" the 1971 portrait of reminiscence as a high-stakes competition among a husband, a wife and her best friend â€" at the Harold Pinter Theater in the West End. And if you see it twice â€" which means seeing Ms. Thomas and Ms. Williams in both female roles â€" you’ll find you have even more to talk about.

Like how radically the chemistry can alter among the same three people, and how words change shape and color when spoken by different performers. And how infinitely mutable and distortable memory is. That includes your recollections of what you think you saw and heard when you last experienced this play.

My first weekend of theater-going in London this seaso! n was all about old times and old friends, you might say, though it was hardly old hat. I had assumed I was very well acquainted with “Old Times,” which I caught (twice) on Saturday and the 1981 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” which I saw in a heart-clutching revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory on Sunday.

But I should have learned by now that assuming you know any play (like any person) inside-out is just arrogant. “Old Times” â€" which I had often regarded as a ravishing, melancholy conundrum- comes across this time as a vibrant, sometimes achingly clear comedy of the war that is waged in any relationship.

“Merrily” is work that I (like many Sondheim-ophiles) had consigned to the file of shows that, however flecked with brilliance, were too burdened by unfixable flaws to take flight.Yet this production, the maiden professional directorial effort of the actress (and frequent Sondheim interpreter) Maria Friedman, feels utterly and improbably airbrne.

Simon Annand Kristin Scott Thomas, left, and Lia Williams in “Old Times.”

It seems apposite that these shows, which I saw back-to-back, should both be about revisiting the past. And more or less the same period, too: the mid-20th century, when the characters portrayed were hopeful and unformed and reveled, as a character in “Old Times” says, in “the sheer expectation of it all, the looking forwardness of it all.”

Not that you can take those words, or any words in “Old Times,” on trust. Which brings us to the essential difference between these works, aside from the obvious distinction that one sings and the other doesn’t. (O.K., there is some singing in “Old Time! s,” but! you know what I mean.) In “Merrily” - which uses reverse chronology to explore the dissolution of a triangular friendship - hindsight is painfully 20/20; in “Old Times,” it is, at best, astigmatic and, at worst, downright hallucinatory.

“There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place,” says Anna in “Old Times.” Anna was the best - and possibly only - friend of Kate, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Now she has chosen to renew that acquaintance by visiting Kate and her husband, Deeley (Mr. Sewell), in their remote, ocean-side house, and to revisit a past that they did or didn’t share.

The past is always a shifting and murky landscape in Pinter. What this production brings out so vividly is how that ambiguity means the past is also up for grabs. The person who presents the most persuasive version of it is the one who’s in control. “Old Times” is, like every Pinter drama, a power play. And Mr. Rickson’s interpretation resnates with the clash of memories as weapons, as Deeley and the worldly Anna stake their claims to the ownership of the passive Kate.

“I shall be watching you to see if she’s the same person,” Deeley says to Kate before Anna arrives, in a declaration that can be read several ways. When I heard that Ms. Scott Thomas and Ms. Williams would be switching roles in alternating performances of “Old Times,” I figured the idea of the women as somehow interchangeable would be the production’s fulcrum.

But that’s not what has happened. No matter which role they play, the inwardly centered Ms. Scott Thomas and the more visibly anxious Ms. Williams project almost opposite stage presences. This means that though the play always arrives at the same point, the road to that conclusion winds in different directions.

With Ms. Scott Thomas as an impenetrably self-assured, predatory Anna to Ms. Williams’s prickly, waifish Kate, “Old Times” feels darkly suspenseful. Ms. Williams’s mo! re improv! isatory and defensive Anna - opposite Ms. Scott Thomas’s distanced, abstracted Kate â€" makes the play more obviously a comedy.

And in the middle, Mr. Sewell adjusts his posture, his walk, the rhythms and emphases of his speech with wonderfully fine calibration to suit the change of actresses. (As fine as the women are, his performance is for me the most complex of the three - or five.) Seeing both versions, I found it especially gratifying to hear the changes in all three characters’ line readings. Who knew there could so many, and such revelatory, ways of pronouncing the word “gaze”

Tristram Kenton Mark Umbers, left, and Damian Humbley in “Merrily W Roll Along” at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

Though “Merrily” has received rave reviews - and is already scheduled for a West End transfer (to the Harold Pinter Theater, if you please, after “Old Times” ends its limited run) - I approached the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark with limited expectations. I’d seen an Encores! concert production of the show last year that had left me shaking my head over the incompatibility of its glorious score and hackneyed script.

But like the John Doyle production of another Sondheim musical, “Passion,” which recently opened at the Classic Stage Company in New York, this “Merrily” benefits from being presented in cramped quarters. It also resembles Mr. Doyle’s! “Passi! on” in that it explicitly frames the story through the perspective of its leading man.

That’s Franklin Shepard (Mark Umbers), whom we follow backward in time from his glittery heights (and moral depths) as a 35-year-old Hollywood director to his beginnings in Manhattan as an idealistic young composer. And, yes, the story’s heartbreak-of-success, Faustian-bargain clichés remain intact.

But instead of pretending this Jacqueline Susann aspect doesn’t exist, Ms. Friedman and company embrace it with zest, reminding us that in showbiz, certain clichés are taken for religion. (Anybody seen “Smash”) Add to this a wholesale emotional conviction from every one of the principal performers, who include Damian Humbley and Jenna Russell as Franklin’s best friends and Josefina Gabrielle and Clare Foster as the women in his life - and you’ve got a beautifully sung “Merrily” with a heart that’s filled to the bursting point.

It’s not just the intimacy of the theater that makes “Mrrily” so affecting; it’s the intimacy that exists among the main characters, who are always either touching and embracing one another or seeming to wish they could (in times of estrangement). For once, I even felt sorry for egotistical, shallow old Franklin, because Mr. Umbers conveyed so much genuine pain over the way his character’s life has turned out.

Despite the old (and now mostly retired) rap on Mr. Sondheim as an artist of cerebral detachment, the best recent productions of his work have throbbed with bone-deep longing and pain. Like Mr. Doyle, Ms. Friedman understands that for a Sondheim show to succeed, the first order business is to locate where it hurts.