SOURCE: “The Memory of All That: Pinter's Old Times,” in English, Vol. 22, No. 114, Autumn, 1975, pp. 99-102.

In the following essay, Aylwin reviews the way characters in Old Times determine their identities, and interact with each other on the basis of their memories of the past.

In the Sunday papers following the first performance of Old Times (1 June 1971), Ronald Bryden (The Observer) wrote: ‘The techniques, the preoccupations are the same. There's no new departure from the ground he has made his own.’ Harold Hobson (The Sunday Times) wrote: ‘Old Times is the most technically daring play that Harold Pinter has written … it is dangerous to suppose that the ambiguity of a new Pinter play is merely a development of the ambiguity of one that preceded it.’ Pinter has said: ‘There are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement’,¹ so it is perhaps understandable that two highly complimentary...