Harold Pinter wrote 29 plays and 27 screenplays. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to his life as a dramatist and screenwriter, he was also an actor, director, poet, novelist, essayist, and political activist. His career spanned over 50 years, and he is universally recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest playwrights.

Pinter began his career in the early 1950s as an actor, traveling across England for a dozen years to play more than three dozen roles in a variety of provincial theaters. In an interview he once remarked, “My favorite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They’re something to get your teeth into.” This penchant for the ominous spilled over into his writing, and during this time Pinter also wrote several plays that launched his career, later dubbed by critics as “comedies of menace.”

Pinter is really a master of deceit. His characters inhabit mysterious worlds and hide their motives beneath a thin veneer of appearances. A sense of danger pervades virtually all of his plays. For Pinter, a certain void, a lack of answers, is always at the heart of his drama; his characters often seek explanations where there are none. This sense of the mysterious is what makes his plays fundamentally compelling. Ambiguity should have been Harold Pinter’s middle name. His keen ear for the rhythms and intonations of the English language creates a spare and musical dialogue, distinguished by a proliferation of silences and pauses that have become his trademark. The brevity of Pinter’s language has always left lots of room for the constant, turbulent conflict that thrives beneath his dialogue. His distinctive style has been captured by the term “Pinteresque,” which has now become a common adjective in Western theater parlance.

In some fashion or other Pinter’s plays focus on the inner self, and many of his scripts explore the use of memory (however inconsistent it may be) as an avenue to understanding that elusive self. Nowhere was he more successful than in “Old Times,” written in 1970 and first performed in both London and New York in 1971. The play spends an evening with a trio of characters: Kate and Deeley, who have been married almost 30 years, and Kate’s old friend Anna, who has come to visit. The three reminisce about “old times,” when Kate and Anna, young women in London, shared a flat and explored the city together. They also talk about that same period when Deeley and Kate first met. As the characters reveal their memories, stories begin to overlap and sometimes blatantly contradict each other. The critic Arthur Ganz explains, “In Pinter the past is a misty wasteland into which one makes sporadic forays, returning with fragments of insight and information which contradict and confuse as much as they enlighten.” Deeley, Kate, and Anna take this journey into the past, and it reveals a dark undercurrent of tension that ultimately leads all three characters into very dangerous territory.

I first encountered “Old Times” as a graduate student at Florida State University. I was so intrigued by the innumerable unanswered questions in the script that I began to read everything I could find about the play. Pinter himself said this: “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” Deeley, Kate, and Anna all manipulate both truth and lies in a battle of wits and wills, and language becomes their weapon.

As I write, I am in the midst of rehearsals for an upcoming production of “Old Times” with members of the Actors Group. Thirty years after I first read this play, I find it as fascinating as ever. “Old Times” will be performed at Club Z on December 8-10 and 15-17 at 7:30 p.m.