All Stories
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.