‘Looking back through smoke’: The Faces of Memory in Harold Pinter’s Old Times (1971)
In his play written in 1971, Harold Pinter builds the stage as a place haunted by the echoes of a forlorn past. Memory first appears as a homecoming, a ceremonial meeting with ‘good old times’. A middle-aged couple, Deeley and Kate, is about to welcome Kate’s old friend, Anna, whom she has not seen...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2005-11-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/13783 |
| Summary: | In his play written in 1971, Harold Pinter builds the stage as a place haunted by the echoes of a forlorn past. Memory first appears as a homecoming, a ceremonial meeting with ‘good old times’. A middle-aged couple, Deeley and Kate, is about to welcome Kate’s old friend, Anna, whom she has not seen in twenty years. Anna’s arrival is prepared, in a sort of evocative ritual, both laborious and painful, through a would-be dialogue between husband and wife in which the past is being devoured rather than disclosed to the public. With Anna on stage, the audience can but observe how this past dissimulates, grimaces or eclipses; so much so that we are forced to wonder what the nature of this mischievous intentionality which engulfs time in spite of the characters and the audience is. Memory paralyses, swallows, and eventually turns into an actress behind the mask of a terrible oblivion. Pinter displays the failure of the optimistic opinion which consists in believing that we can recover the whole meaning of our past by working on our subconscious. Old Times shows how, paradoxically enough, even our own memory does not belong to us. The play is meant to be the tragedy of memory. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |