(Chris Jones’s article appeared in the Chicago Tribune, 10/10.)
When it comes to love and sex, we tend to think of intimacy as a goal or an ideal — something to work toward. But that delightful state, by its very definition, both implies and requires exclusion. It's tough to be intimate in a crowd. Even a third wheel can be one too wheel too many and must be rolled away.
Or not, of course.
"Old Times," the brief but masterful Harold Pinter drama from 1971, is certainly concerned with the juicy current possibilities of matters amorous and triangular. But this spare, oft-revived story of an English couple, Kate and Deely, who welcome into their renovated farmhouse a mysterious woman, Anna, with whom Kate shared a London flat (and maybe more) 20 years prior, is also about the force of our memories of intimacies, be they real or imagined.