'Old Times' at the Maidment Studio

By PETER CALDER

MAIDMENT STUDIO, Auckland - The title may suggest something comfortable but menace hangs in the air thickly in Pinter's taut three-hander, first produced in 1971.

All three characters are on stage when the lights come up, but we know at once something is wrong: the visitor is there but not there, imminent, faceless, threatening.

Kate and Deeley (Theresa Healey and Michael Lawrence) host Anna (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) in their beach house and after dinner the two women reminisce about their shared salad days in London.

But, almost imperceptibly, the evening morphs into a duel between Deeley and Anna. Who has "owned" more of Kate? Who, by extension, owns her now?

In classic Pinter style, the language becomes the bridge between plot and the dark, swirling subtext which is as much anthropological as psychological. The past becomes contestable (a bracing conceit for audiences in the age of "recovered" memory and a riposte to anyone who thinks Pinter is so last century). Power belongs to whoever can tell the best story.

"There are things I remember," Anna says reflectively at one point, and the syntax makes it tantalisingly ambiguous, "which may never have happened but as I recall them, so they take place."

On John Parker's clinically simple set - icy suspended venetians and white cotton create a space which feels hauntingly disconnected from the world - Paul Gittins directs intelligently, moving his cast like chess pieces in a deadly endgame.

Their self-satisfied accents are silk and butter, and the dialogue, cleverly delivered just too slow or too fast for comfort, is full of unspoken potentiality: lines peter out and conversations, wrenched off course, end suddenly where they started.

Ward-Lealand, like her character, rather devours the other two. Her Anna, charming and dangerous, is the link between them and she performs with a juggler's dexterity. That Deeley is no match for her sometimes seems more down to Lawrence's craft than Pinter's intention, and Healey doesn't always invest Kate's detachment with enough ambiguity.

But these are small matters. It's fun to see a Pinter as full of vigour as the day it was written. That, one supposes, is the mark of a classic.