What Does It Mean? Roundabout's OLD TIMES Designers Discuss Interpreting Harold Pinter

"What does it all mean?" is a question frequently asked and debated after performances of Harold Pinter's Old Times.

Pinter himself once famously replied to an actor who inquired about the play's meaning, "I don't know. Just play it."

Eve Best, Clive Owen and Kelly Reilly are the three stars currently playing Pinter's tense and icy power struggle between a married couple and the woman who may have come between them in director Douglas Hodge's Roundabout Theatre Company production.

In the Roundabout's latest blog entry, Hodge and two members of his design team explain the ideas and inspirations behind their production.

The play premiered and is set in the early 1970s and costume designer Constance Hoffman explains how her designs follow "the way experience and memory refract and resonate among the characters. The past and the present merge, and each of the characters' memories of events feels both true and mutable."

She notes how the 70s was a decade where fashion reflected nostalgia and memory from past eras, so she dresses the three characters in ways that represent the memory of simpler times.

Clive Goodwin's sound design strikes the audience from the very onset. His goal was to devise a soundscape that plays "into the subconscious of the audience as if hearing their own dreams, memories and thoughts," allowing them to witness the characters on stage searching into their memories while being reminded of memories of their own.

The director says of his collaboration with set designer Christine Jones, "I suggested unhelpful things, such as the walls are made of ice, and she took it and ran with it in her own way."

One of the production's most unusual features is the large slab of ice center stage. Another that the audience may not be aware of is that the playing area is slowly, but continuously, revolving.

The production's music was composed by Thom Yorke from Radiohead. Says Hodge, "He read the play, fell in love with it, and immediately came back with some music that was all played backwards."

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Directed by Douglas Hodge, Clive Owen stars in the new production of Old Times opposite Eve Bestand Kelly Reilly. The show features original music by Radiohead's Thom Yorke. Old Timesbegan previews on September 17, 2015, and opened officially on October 6, 2015. This is a limited engagement through Sunday, November 29, 2015, on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre (227 West 42nd Street).

In Pinter's unsettling drama of desire and blurred realities, Owen portrays Deeley, a man quite looking forward to meeting Anna (Best), his wife Kate's (Reilly) friend from long ago. But as the night goes on, Anna's visit quickly shifts from an ordinary sharing of memories to a quiet battle for power. Douglas Hodge, a frequent performer and director of Pinter's works, directs the haunting and passionate revival.