Theatre: OLD TIMES Wyndham's, London

The back of my copy of Old Times quotes Harold Pinter's famously unhelpful answer to the question: what is he writing about? "I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: that is what happened. This is what they said. That is what they did."

It's a line that's particularly frustrating in the context of Old Times, a play in which what they said, what they did, is always open to doubt or revision. It may be that when they were girls together in west London, Kate and Anna did live the breathless, exciting, artistically rich existence that Anna recollects. But 20 years on, when Anna comes to visit at their house in the country, Kate seems pretty hazy about it, and her husband, Deeley, claims to know Anna from a rather seedier context, hanging around in pubs with men who paid for her drinks. It may be, too, that Deeley met Kate when they were alone in a cinema watching Odd Man Out; but how do you square that with Anna's version, in which she saw the film with Kate?

The point of the play is, roughly speaking, how we construct our own versions of the past, and how other people's constructions impinge on us. Deeley and Anna struggle to impose their different memories and their different versions of the silent, beautiful Kate, constructing new stories and revising the old ones as the balance of the conflict shifts. She, meanwhile, hovers on the fringes of the conversation, smiling beatifically, mouthing the occasional banality ("Yes, I quite like those kind of things, doing it" - "What kind of things?" - "Oh, you know, that sort of thing"), less a personality than an icon.

You can see exactly why Julie Christie seemed good casting for the part - the first thing that strikes you, watching Lindy Davies's production at Wyndham's, is that she is still sensationally beautiful. But that old line about nothing being the hardest thing to do on stage turns out to be frustratingly true, and Christie's relative inexperience in the theatre shows - the fixed smile is rather too cheesy and immobile, her gestures and changes of expression feel too drilled. The production does use her age to advantage, though, towards the end, when a lighting change shows up the lines on her face and throat, pointing up the disparity between the girl who's being remembered and the woman she's grown into.

The best moments in the play are the ones when Leigh Lawson's seedy Deeley and Harriet Walter's sleek, brittle Anna have the stage to themselves. Lawson's performance is a particularly agreeable surprise. It's true that he hasn't got the measure of the character's darker side - a criticism you could extend to the whole production, which never quite squares up to the play's morbid undercurrents. But it does bring out, very enjoyably, Pinter's nasty sense of humour, and Lawson is at times brilliantly funny, slouching around the stage with a leer that's half ingratiating, half threatening, plastered across his baggy, plastic face.

In his duels with Walter, especially at the beginning of Act 2, which finds them both in the bedroom, you get not just a clash of personalities, but also an illuminating clash of acting styles. Walter offers far more subtle, detailed acting - when he starts telling her how he once looked up her skirt at a party, her expression conveys an almost impossibly nuanced mix of fear, excitement and disgust. It's an excellent performance which reminds you that, whatever he says, Pinter's writing goes far beyond simply what people said, what people did.

n To 2 Sept. Booking: 0171-369 1736