The Power of the Past; Two new London productions tackle the meaning of history.( The History Boys)(Old Times)(Theater Review)

Byline: Tara Pepper

For 19th-century historians like Macaulay and Trevelyan, the past was a steadily unfolding narrative of great events driven by heroic men, a map to inspire boys to create a nobler world. Future generations developed new fields like economic and social history, and emphasized the importance of exploring the underlying causes of events. More recently, Simon Schama lamented, "Historians are left forever chasing shadows." Now two new productions on the London stage tackle the troubling question: what exactly is history and why does it wield so much power over us?

In the edgy, tension-filled revival of Harold Pinter's "Old Times" (at the Donmar Warehouse through September), the past is painfully stripped of objectivity. Raw emotions color how each character recalls it. When Kate (Gina McKee) and her husband, Deeley (Jeremy Northam), receive a visit from their old chum Anna (Helen McCrory), the peace of their idyllic farmhouse is shattered. Anna struggles to win Kate's affections again with animated tales of their girlhoods in the city, an endless round of apparently jolly concerts and parties. Yet Kate has already confided to her husband how lonely she was then, loathing the city, and how she prefers the calm of the country and the ocean.

Anna and Deeley battle over their different versions of those days. When they sing alternate lines of an old song--"The way you hold your hat / The way you sip your tea / The memory of all that / No they can't take that away from me"--it becomes a threatening dance over ownership of Kate, and of the past. Deeley fights with facts, but erotic, glamorous Anna whips up his long-buried memories: Did he know her back then? Did he once spend an entire drunken party looking up her skirt? Did he fall in love with her first? All of a sudden he's dizzy, not sure what happened anymore. "Oh how the ghost of you clings," he murmurs, entranced by Anna's black stilettos.

Set a world away in ...