Reading Order
Old Times Reading Order
Old Times (1971) by Harold Pinter is a play about memory, possession, and the past — or rather, about the impossibility of recovering the past and the violence of competing claims about what it was. Anna arrives to visit her old friend Kate and Kate's husband Deeley, and over the course of the evening the relationship between the three of them becomes increasingly strange: who knew Kate first; what happened between Anna and Kate in the London flat they shared twenty years ago; what Deeley's relationship to both women actually is. Pinter called the play his most autobiographical work, and it is organized around the same question that all his plays organized: who tells the true story of the past? The play's answer is that memory is not a record of what happened but a weapon used to claim territory — and that the territory being claimed is always a person.
Where to start
Old Times (1971) — the complete text. Best Pinter reading order: The Birthday Party → The Caretaker → The Homecoming → Betrayal → Old Times → No Man's Land → Landscape
Complete Old Times Book List
- 1Buy
Old Times
Harold Pinter·1971·The complete play — Deeley, Kate, and Anna in the cottage, and the competing memories of twenty years ago. One of Pinter's most elegant and disturbing plays; the first production starred Colin Blakely, Dorothy Tutin, and Vivien Merchant at the Aldwych Theatre in London - 2Buy
The Homecoming
Harold Pinter·1965·The companion organized around the return home and the disturbing realignment of relationships that follows. The companion Pinter play as an investigation of the same dynamic: a household of men, an arriving woman, and the question of who will possess whom - 3Buy
Betrayal
Harold Pinter·1978·The companion organized around memory and an adulterous affair told in reverse chronology. The companion Pinter play as an investigation of the relationship between memory and possession: both Old Times and Betrayal are organized around the question of who knows the true story of the past and what that knowledge gives them - 4Buy
No Man's Land
Harold Pinter·1975·The companion organized around two ageing men and their competing versions of a shared past. The companion Pinter play as an investigation of the same question that organizes Old Times: what happens when two people claim the same past? Here Spooner and Hirst cannot agree about whether they have met before, and the uncertainty opens onto the same abyss - 5Buy
Landscape
Harold Pinter·1968·The companion organized around two figures (a man and a woman) who speak at length about their memories but not to each other. The companion Pinter play as an investigation of the isolation of memory: Beth's memory and Duff's memory occupy the same room but do not meet; like Old Times, the play is about the impossibility of sharing the past even with the person you shared it with - 6Buy
The Birthday Party
Harold Pinter·1958·Pinter's first full-length play — Stanley at his seaside boarding house, and the arrival of Goldberg and McCann. The companion Pinter play as the ur-text of the Pinteresque: two strangers arrive, the existing household is disrupted, the relationship between past and present becomes impossible to establish - 7Buy
A Kind of Alaska
Harold Pinter·1982·The companion Pinter play about the relationship between the past self and the present self — Deborah, who has been in a catatonic sleep for twenty-nine years, wakes up and encounters the person she is now, who she cannot recognize. The companion to Old Times as an investigation of the impossibility of recovering the person you were when the world you were part of has changed - Buy
Betrayal
OptionalHarold Pinter·1978·Already listed above — Pinter's play about an adulterous affair told in reverse chronological order. Included again here because it pairs most directly with Old Times as an investigation of memory and possession
Old Times — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Old Times about?
Old Times is about memory as a form of territorial claim — the way that the competing stories we tell about the past are not attempts to recover what actually happened but attempts to possess the people whose past we are claiming to share. Anna arrives to visit Kate and Deeley, and the play is organized around the increasingly disturbing revelation that both Anna and Deeley are claiming Kate's past for themselves: Anna because she knew Kate first and lived with her; Deeley because he married her. By the end of the play, the relationship between memory and reality has become impossible to establish, and the question of who possessed Kate — and when, and how — hangs over the stage without being resolved.
What is the significance of the ending of Old Times?
The ending of Old Times returns to a tableau that the play opened with — Anna lying on the divan, Deeley sitting and weeping, Kate moving between them — before Kate lies down on her own divan. The ending suggests that the play's events have been a kind of return to an equilibrium that preceded Deeley: that Kate and Anna's relationship preceded and survives Deeley's. But Pinter refuses to resolve the ambiguity about what has actually happened: we don't know whether what we have seen is memory, fantasy, or present action; whether Anna is alive or dead; whether Kate has ever been truly possessed by either of them. The ending is Pinter at his most disturbing precisely because it looks conclusive while remaining completely open.
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