Watching the Shakepeare Theatre’s new production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times is a little like watching a life-size shoebox diorama. Designer Walt Spangler’s set, lit with a cinematic eye by Scott Zielinski, turns the stage of the Lansburgh Theatre into a rigidly-defined rectangle, with white walls, ceiling, and floor, white modernist furnishings, and a long row of rectangular windows at the back meant to look at the sea beyond the walls of this remote English country house. It’s cold, sterile, and more enclosed than one is used to seeing at the theater, and heightens the voyeuristic sense of peering in on a carefully constructed moment in the lives of its characters.

Franz Kafka ordered his friend Max Brod to burn his incomplete novel The Trial after his death in 1924; Brod edited and published it instead. Although written more than 80 years ago, the book was so prescient in its portrayal of a idly malevolent bureaucracy that it feels timeless. Christopher Gallu has written a new adaptation for Catalyst Theatre Company (where he is Producing Artistic Director), and here he steps into some mammoth shoes:…