PREVIEW: Harold Pinter’s Old Times burrows into ‘dark, unspoken places’
Production brings together four old friends, including local theatre giant Gary Smith as director, for the British playwright’s intriguing and haunting tale about memory, power and desire.
Long-time area actor and director Dia Gupta Frid formed her production company, Frid Pro Quo at the end of 2025 and Old Times is already the company’s third production. Three more possible projects are in pre-production, says Frid.
However, the production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times in the Studio Theatre at The Staircase Theatre, June 25 through 28, is the culmination of things long desired. It’s the passion project of a quartet of theatre friends who have known one another for decades: Frid, Gary Smith, Willard Boudreau, and Maureen ‘Moe’ Dwyer.
“During the pandemic, I began to hound Willard with my wish to act with him as I had never done so, and it became a running gag between us,” Frid recalls. “Then, when [Boudreau’s husband] Gary was unwell last year, I realized that time was running out and I said to Willard, ‘If you and I do a play together, will Gary direct it?’”
Shortly afterwards, Smith announced his retirement.
Frid asked him if he could do one more play, what would it be?
“So we’re doing Old Times in honour of Gary. He has invested his whole life in the Hamilton community and championed so many artists. It’s a joy to be able to honour him this way.”
Smith is, of course, a theatre institution in Hamilton, having written about theatre “and its personalities” for The Spectator for decades and participating in community theatre as an actor and director for even more. Retirement from a busy reviewing schedule may have been motivated by health issues, but it hasn’t extinguished Smith’s desire to create theatre. “It has certainly made me aware that there are shows I would still like to do,” he says. “Directing is serious work and requires a great deal of physical and emotional energy and commitment. To direct something, I would have to feel totally invested in the project.”
Smith says it just hadn’t worked out to take on the project with Frid.
“Then along came my retirement plans and I decided it was now or never if we were to do something together. Dia is financing the play. I chose the vehicle. I had directed Old Times in 1993, but I felt [there was] an opportunity to do a version of Pinter’s play that was for 2026.”
Smith acknowledges it could be his last production.
“I would love to do a number of plays and musicals but I am not blessed with the strength I once had,” Smith says. “I believe this is my last play … but I also say MAYBE. I have directed or co-directed 96 plays or musicals in the area. I may be done but there’s always that one chance, like Old Times, when you just can’t say no.”
The trio of friends asked Dwyer, another long-time friend and actor/director, to join the project as one of three cast members because, as Smith explains, “she fit with us and she is an intuitive actress who would add to the play’s dimensions.”
The four friends has an interwoven history with the others, this one directing and that one acting in a long list of productions.
Says Dwyer: “Dia directed me in Shadowlands and Agnes of God, while Gary and Willard have directed me in many Sondheim musicals over the years, plus Mother Courage, A Delicate Balance, and A Beautiful Thing.”
In the Frid Pro Quo production, Boudreau plays Deeley while Frid plays his wife Kate. Dwyer plays the mysterious friend Anna. A plethora of adjectives has been offered up in the attempt to describe Old Times, including transfixing, disturbing, gripping, baffling, brilliant, and cunning.
“The actors I am working with in Old Times bring experience, a questioning nature, brilliant ideas, and a willingness to share to help shape the production. In the end I am the director but it’s important to listen, sometimes shut up, and always respect the people you are working with,” Smith says.
Boudreau, who has been “a set designer, stage manager, director, and in the right role, actor” for nearly as many years as Smith, has been thoroughly enjoying the process. “Both Dia and Moe are actors of great intensity and passion. So much of Pinter`s Old Times is between the lines and below the surface. What is actually said cannot be trusted to be true,” Boudreau explains. “Both Dia and Moe are uncannily able to burrow into these dark, unspoken places. They illuminate for the audience the passions beneath the words.”
“Rehearsals have been electric and exciting. I think all four of us enjoy the rehearsal process. Moe and Dia never stop finding previously unnoticed subtle nuances in Pinter`s script. Every rehearsal adds something new to the whole fabric.”
The feeling is mutual for Dwyer. “I am always breathless at the choices they make as actors and the insight Gary brings. These are two very giving actors who listen and are wonderful to work with, react to, listen to, and they listen acutely. It is a wonderful, symbiotic relationship on stage,” she says. “I think, never having done this play, or any Pinter, I bring a freshness to the role that perhaps neither Gary, nor Willard or Dia expected, and that has taken us on a different dramatic journey.”
Dwyer says that there are no downsides to working with this group of friends: “Trust, respect, loyalty, all three enhance our experience and journey. We help each other out tremendously. It is a good feeling.”
“The creative process, this aspect of ‘playing’ is such a joy when working with talented friends,” Frid effuses. “There are no challenges. Only joy.”
Their subject matter comes from the aforementioned Harold Pinter, the famous English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who was born in east London in 1930 and died Christmas Eve in 2008. He was the only child of Jewish parents of Eastern European descent; his father was a tailor and his mother was a housewife. Pinter has been called one of the most influential “modern British dramatists” with a career that spanned more than 50 years.
Pinter was a prolific and talented writer, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. He wrote 29 plays, including The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, The Hothouse, The Caretaker, The Collection, The Lover, and Old Times. Pinter also wrote 21 screenplays, including The Pumpkin Eater, The Servant, The Go-Between, and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Additionally, Pinter directed dozens of productions including James Joyce's Exiles; David Mamet's Oleanna; Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose; Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward; numerous plays by Simon Gray as well as many of his own plays.
Pinter briefly attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but dropped out. He continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre for over a decade. In the early years of his career, Pinter worked as a waiter, a postman, and a bouncer to supplement his wages from acting while aspiring to be a poet and writer.
Pinter’s first play was a student production, The Room, written in 1957. His second play, The Birthday Party, is one of his best-known works but was initially a complete flop that was still championed, fortunately, by at least one passionate critic. His early works were often described as "comedies of menace," in which apparently innocent situations gradually become more and more threatening and absurd as the characters behave in inexplicable ways. Meanwhile, by 1967, Pinter had become a celebrity playwright with his play The Homecoming having won that year’s Tony Award for Best Play.
Later plays written from the late 1960s to the 1980s, such as Old Times, No Man's Land, Betrayal and A Kind of Alaska became known as Pinter’s "memory plays." These plays were considered complex, ambiguous, and ‘quicksand-like’ in nature. Overall, his style was dubbed ‘Pinteresque,’ although Pinter himself disliked the term. He had a reputation for being blunt, terse, prickly, and explosive with strong political views.
Old Times premiered in 1971 with the Royal Shakespeare Company under the director Peter Hall at Aldwych Theatre. The original cast included Colin Blakely, Dorothy Tutin, and Vivien Merchant, who was then Pinter’s wife. Hall also directed the Broadway premiere, which was in November 1971 at the Billy Rose Theater. It starred Robert Shaw, Rosemary Harris and Mary Ure. Over the years, productions of Old Times have featured such notable actors as Anthony Hopkins, Julie Christie, Helen McCrory, Susannah Harker, Rufus Sewell, Kristin Scott Thomas, Clive Owen (in his Broadway debut), and Eve Best.
Paul Taylor and Holly Williams of The Independent ranked Old Times as one of the 40 greatest plays ever written, and described it as one of Pinter's ‘most haunting and unnerving pieces.’ “I chose Old Times because it is a challenging work that is deeply poetic, and in many ways nostalgic,” director Smith says. “I also chose it because it is a fascinating look at control, dovetailing relationships and as Pinter suggests, much of what is remembered may not ever have really happened.”
Interestingly, Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre is also set to present Old Times this summer, from Aug. 8 to Sept. 7, directed by Peter Pasyk. It’s Soulpepper that offers the most succinct summary of play, calling it “a taut psychosexual thriller exploring memory, power, and desire. When Anna visits her old friend Kate and her husband Deeley after 20 years, conflicting recollections surface, blurring the line between past and present. As a battle for dominance unfolds, memory becomes a weapon, and reality becomes increasingly uncertain.”
As the play evolves, it reveals the enigma of memory, asking audiences to question reality and reflect on what is real and what is imagination. The Guardian once wrote that Old Times “exposes the way we shape the past according to the psychological needs of the present.”
One interesting element of the casting is that while the characters in the original production were described as being in their 40s, the local cast is significantly older. Neither the director nor the cast see this as an issue. “Honestly, surprisingly, it doesn't change that much,” Dwyer says. “We have changed some phrases such as ‘20 years’ to 'many years.’ It is a play that questions the authenticity of memory so whether we are 40 or 60 or 80, memory is memory and everyone has their own recollections.”
Frid agrees wholeheartedly. “In 1971, when this play was written, turning 40 was the beginning of old age. We now – thank god – are part of a society where the aging process is no longer equated with dotage,” she says. “Also, what we’ve discovered is that there is a greater sense of tragedy, poignancy and bitterness in an older cast. Memory is a weapon.”
“Yes, the actors here are some years older than the characters in Pinter’s play. Amazingly, I don’t think it matters a jot. The situation and the recollections of the times their lives so passionately intersected are the same,” Smith says. “Also, there is an unstated ageism in the theatre. Actors of a certain age, especially women, only find grandma parts unless they are extremely well known in professional theatre work. I wanted to see how this can be altered and good roles can be reclaimed for them.”
“I hope audiences will choose to come to see three very experienced and fine actors give a great text a tough-edged and bold reading,” Smith says. “I hope they will go away willing to choose more controversial and intriguing pays to invest their time in. I also hope most of all they will find Mr. Pinter’s play beguiling.”
In the past two decades, interest in Pinter’s work has clearly not disappeared. Before his death, there has been a Harold Pinter Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City; a two-week "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival of Creative Genius in Toronto; and a nearly month-long PinterFest held by the Manitoba Theatre Centre, at which twelve of Pinter's plays were performed. In 2011, Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) announced it was renaming its Comedy Theatre in London as The Harold Pinter Theatre. In 2013, Old Times received an Olivier Award nomination for Best Revival of a Play.
Asked what she hopes audiences will take away from this production, Dwyer responds, “I hope they walk away thinking and asking questions: who told the truest story, did any of them? I personally love a play that makes me think and has me thinking when it is over.”
In encouraging theatregoers to come see Old Times, Boudreau has this to say: “What audiences will take away from this play is entirely within themselves. Pinter has never been easy to interpret; in fact, he has been known to have cautioned, ‘don’t bother.’ In Old Times his text is elegant, lyrical, comic and poignant: a joy to recite! My best wish for our audience is to find it a joy to hear.”
NEED TO KNOW
Frid Pro Quo presents Old Times by Harold Pinter
June 25 to 27, 8 p.m. and June 27 & 28, 2 p.m.
(Opening night SOLD OUT)
Studio Theatre
The Staircase Theatre
27 Dundurn St. N., Hamilton
Tickets are here
Run time: 75 minutes
