You won’t get a straight answer from Harold Pinter’s Old Times. And according to Peter Pasyk, Director of the stylish remount that opens the Soulpepper Theatre 2026 season, that’s exactly the point.
“Old Times is considered Pinter’s masterpiece, though it is rarely produced. This is your opportunity to see it,” he says simply, of the elusive 1971 drama. Minimalist and mercurial, Old Times is a tightly coiled, surreal living room drama about memory, desire, and the fragility of truth. When couple Kate and Deeley are visited by Anna, who is Kate’s friend from twenty years ago when the two were secretaries in London, the night spirals into a tug-of-war over the past – and over Kate herself. As recollections clash and time folds in on itself, reality blurs and unravels.
“The play unearths the primal animal that lays beneath the surface in all of us: the violent, carnal animal that we mask with civility, language and rationality,” explains Pasyk. “The play could be described as a psychosexual thriller. It is suspenseful, erotic, and quite funny and surprising, too. Pinter gives the audience a mystery to solve…but there are no simple answers here.”
In Pasyk’s hands, this is very much a play that makes you squirm – as you strive to piece together what’s happening on stage, while squinting at your own memories.The production features a powerhouse trio of performers in Anita Majumdar as Kate, Christopher Morris as Deeley, and Jenny Young as Anna; and it marks Pasyk’s return to Soulpepper, following his acclaimed 2023 staging of Hamlet at Stratford.
Old Times may cultivate ambiguity and resist resolution, but the directorial challenge remains rigorous. “As a director, every choice I make has to be specific,” he explains. “I cannot be ambiguous in my work with the actors, even though the play presents itself as a mystery. We all need to have an internal understanding of the present action of the play. It is Pinter’s structure, his formal tricks in the script, that create ambiguity. Each character in his play has a different interpretation of past and present events. But isn’t that true of life?”
Whether audiences come away wondering if they’ve seen a dream, or a memory, or some nexus of shared consciousness, or something else entirely, Pasyk requires that on stage, the actors remain grounded. “Even if, for example, we cooked up a theory that the whole action of this play is a dream (and I’m not saying it is!) … we cannot play ‘dream’. The characters still have to be living, breathing people with desires and relationships.”
This grounding has been cultivated through an open and intimate rehearsal process —an absolute necessity when the entire show hinges on the tension crackling and sparks flying among just three people.
But this process begins in an unexpected place. “We laugh a lot!” he shares. “I have to give a big shout out to the cast. Anita, Jenny and Christopher really are remarkable talents. I am in awe of them. My approach on such an intimate chamber drama is frank honesty from the outset. Especially on a show that is so erotically charged. I always try to create an environment where no subjects are taboo – because our art is the examination of the human condition and its behaviours. We have to be able to work under conditions where we feel free to be embarrassed, to get things wrong. So we got very close, very fast in our rehearsal process.”
It shows in the work. Pinter’s play can mesmerize, alienate, or confound. With its minimalist script, which frequently asks actors to say one thing while implying something very different, it takes a strong interpretive vision to make Old Times work. Here, the three performances – coolly stylized and uniformly excellent – bring sharpness, control and menace to the material’s layered tension. The trio’s interplay is supercharged: with innuendo, eerily still moments and pregnant pauses that stretch audiences across a rack of tantalizing, taut tension.
The design choices deepen the impact. Lorenzo Savoini’s set — a sparse, sophisticated room dominated by angular mid-century furniture and a large reflective window — positions the audience as both observers and observed. Before the show begins, the window reflectively catches the house, setting up a subtle feedback loop of memory and perspective. Then midway through the play, the furniture is rearranged in darkness between acts. Its new formation renders the room eerily familiar, yet strange. The shift is simple, but its psychological effect is potent: destabilizing our certainty in an echo of the play’s central question: how much of what we remember is real?
Asked which of the three characters holds the real power in the play, Pasyk will not tip his hand. “I must politely evade answering this question, as it risks me exposing my own interpretation of the ending of the play – which I truly believe is no more valid than [that of] anyone else seeing the show,” he says. “My own opinions would only get in the way of others’ enjoyment of the riddles within the play.”
Yet he can’t resist doubling back for this recursive response: “What I can say is that Anita [who plays Kate] has kept many secrets from me and her fellow actors. They all harbour secrets in this play. Secrets are the engine of this play.”
This riddling quality is endlessly fascinating – and a bottomless resource. While Old Times was written more than 50 years ago, its questions about memory and perception feel as urgent as ever. “This play is evergreen because it is about something more essential than politics or culture,” Pasyk asserts. “You can certainly glean metaphors from this play for the current moment – but I think this would be equally true in any other time. It is why the play has survived the shifting winds of politics and culture. The play is deeply philosophical, but also accessible. And it underlines certain truths about ourselves that we all can recognize.” At its most fundamental level, “it is about love, identity, memory, time.”
When you say it that way… what else is there?
Of course, Old Times has long divided critics, who frequently praise its fascinating abstraction and unnerving tension, but differ on whether the refusal to explain itself is brilliant, maddening, or empty. For some, the play’s slippery relationship with truth and identity feels relevant and rich. But for others, it’s just too obscure. But regardless, few who see Old Times leave untouched. “What I will say about the play is it defies easy categorization,” Pasyk observes. “In our current cultural climate, a lot of art and entertainment tells us what it is. It seems there is a strong appetite for art that does not challenge. Pinter challenges.”
For Pasyk, the thrill lies in steering against the wind and directly into that challenge, which manifests in the unpredictability of each performance and the reception it will be accorded. “There are several moments in the play that are deeply uncomfortable and unsettling,” he says. “The thrill for me is sitting with audiences from night to night and witnessing how greatly their reactions vary. Audience responses are always unpredictable, and that is the thrill of working in the theatre, and seeing live theatre.”
While Pasyk’s Old Times offers no promise of definitive answers, for those ready to step into the dark, it promises a stylish, stylized and unforgettable puzzle: one whose pieces you will still be moving around long after leaving the theatre. Old Times is on stage at Soulpepper’s Yonge Centre for the Performing Arts until September 7, 2025. Tickets are available at soulpepper.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
