TV REVIEWS : Sinister Suspense Builds in Pinter’s ‘Old Times’

More so than in stage versions of the play, it takes a while to adjust to the people in the television premiere of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times,” a Broadway on Bravo special, presented by the Bravo Channel’s Texaco Performing Arts Showcase (tonight, 7 to 8:30 p.m., also midnight to 1:30 a.m., and April 29, 8 to 9:30 p.m.).

Perhaps it’s because the casting is so eccentric, and casting takes on particular significance in a plotless piece such as this one that relies heavily on mood and character for substance. Kate Nelligan is the enigmatic Kate, and Miranda Richardson is the glamorous Anna, Kate’s long-ago friend who comes to visit after many years.

They are exciting if predictable choices. But John Malkovich as Kate’s somewhat patronizing husband Deeley, the stalking male who may--or not--also have known Anna in the past, seems oddly out of place: a kind of tamed Stanley Kowalski barely tolerating his suit and tie.

The three are charismatic in very different ways, with Malkovich’s animal magnetism more like that of a bull in a china shop, while the women are as wily as foxes and as breakable as porcelain.

We spend 90 uneasy minutes in their presence--in the coolly upscale interior of an isolated farm house on some rugged, lonely shore--bearing witness to psychological legerdemain.

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Tricks of imagination and memory wreak subtle havoc with repressed sexual dynamics that perpetually threaten to explode and drive this play forward while it perpetually remains in place.

Despite the abundant room for latitude in this multifaceted 21-year-old play, it is not easy to pull off. The long, pregnant pauses, more significant here than in Pinter’s other early work, are extended to the breaking point, and the careful mask of behavior that cloaks each character seems at once more calculated and more mysterious than ever.

Sinister is the prevailing mood--as opposed to the almost jocular tone of the 1985 touring production seen at the Henry Fonda Theatre, that was directed by and featured Pinter himself as Deeley.

On TV, producer-director Simon Curtis milks each moment for suspense, suspense, suspense. And since Pinter wrote this screenplay adaptation, one assumes he favored what Curtis had in mind: a stealthy and menacing conundrum, filled with sexual innuendo and without humor, that leaves one as baffled at the end as at the beginning.

Does it work? On a certain level, yes, but fitfully, as a study in exacerbation that can also try one’s patience.

And the discrepancy in acting styles makes for a bumpy ride that demands a considerable suspension of disbelief.