Review: Eve Best, Clive Owen and Kelly Reilly Bring Heat and Iciness To Harold Pinter's OLD TIMES

Designer Christine Jones' backdrop looks like a surrealist sun pulsing down waves of oppressive heat, but perhaps the climate is comfortable for characters in director Douglas Hodge's production of Harold Pinter's OLD TIMES because that big slab upstage center, where the playwright instructs there to be a long window, is... a block of ice?

As Pinter himself once said to an actor when asked about the play's meaning, "I don't know. Just play it."

That model of icy intelligence and elegance, Eve Best, certainly plays it, and is the dominant force in Roundabout's suitably indecipherable revival of his 1971 triangle tease. She is very ably joined by Clive Owen and Kelly Reilly, both making their Broadway debuts.

As the script dictates, the 70 minute play is set in a converted farmhouse accented by spare furnishings. It's the home of filmmaker Deeley (Owen) his wife Kate, (Reilly), who is expecting a visit from her old roommate, Anna (Best).

A few drinks and remembrances of Old Times may be in order, but exactly who is reminiscing with who quickly gets fuzzy. Talk of exchanging underwear and the loveliness of casseroles are simply vehicles for implied communication, and, for this production, loaded with sexual ambiguity.

Owen's Deeley is the kind of confident alpha-male whose cockiness is smirk-worthy to Best's coolly manipulative Anna. Reilly's Kate is the lamb in the equation but the sexual tension is thick and the possibilities ever shifting.

Hodge overdoes it a bit with bright flashes of light and the ominous tones of Thom Yorke's scoring. This is a play best left to the actors, and the trio quite capably provides wonderful flashes and tones on their own.