When Old Times opens at the Globe Theatre tonight it will bring all sorts of memories back for Dunedin actors Terry MacTavish and Ross Johnston.
The pair are revisiting the play 33 years after they last performed it, in the old Fortune Theatre, in the Octagon.
"It's wonderful doing this again, after all these years, because it was a play we loved, but didn't really understand," MacTavish says.
"When we did the play in '75, we were in our early 20s. We were far too young back then to really understand it.
"And that's really what the play is about - how, in your mature life, you wonder about the choices you made when you were in your 20s," she says.
"I was quite shy about the sexual elements of the play back then. Now we're so comfortable and relaxed with each other in a way that young people aren't and we've been laughing over things we'd have found embarrassing then."
The Otago Daily Times reviewer described MacTavish as "dark, textured and petulant" in the 1975 production, while Johnston had a "cool authority".
Johnston rolls his eyes as he recalls how he got involved in the play all over again.
"I partly got into it because Terry kept on badgering me to do it and partly because when I read the play again - at her insistence - I discovered all sorts of resonances in it that I hadn't recognised before," he says.
"I was intrigued by the play. It was like reading a book again, which you last read when you were young.
"I only got half of it last time. The Fortune production in the '70s was cast young, which probably made it particularly difficult for the director, because we had limited life experience to call upon, and this play demands quite a bit of that."
Revisiting the play has given the pair a different perspective from the earlier production.
"One of the intriguing things I've discovered during these rehearsals is that Terry has very, very specific memories about that production that I have long since forgotten, which is ironic, really, because the play is in part about the way we create memories and the way that they in a sense become reality," he says.
"The play is a bit like three people trying to do the same jigsaw.
"The problem is, the jigsaw is a picture of an event in all their past lives and each is bringing different pieces to the puzzle, because they remember, or reinvent, their past differently.
"And that's what makes the play so intriguing," Johnston says.
"It's a universal experience as we all, at some time, have tried to unravel past experiences and argued about whose version of that experience is correct.
In Old Times, just such a discussion takes them where they probably didn't want to go."
Old Times is also about the viewer's own life choices.
"It's about the people you hooked up with and the people you maybe should have hooked up with.
"It's a be-your-own-psychologist sort of a play. It's about testing the truth of your memories with people," MacTavish says.
"We're all bringing a lot of ourselves to it. It's going to be a fascinating play for people of any age to see, because it's about young people negotiating relationships they're going to have to live with."
However, MacTavish is eager to avoid a repetition of one scene in the 1975 production.
"I had to come out in a robe, which was held together with safety pins so the audience wouldn't see too much.
"But, Ross somehow got his hand caught in a safety pin and . . . well, let's just say I exposed rather more of my chest than my mother would have been comfortable with," she laughs.
Johnston also has powerful memories of the original production.
"I remember it because my eldest son, Gios, was due to be born during the production, and he was. But, thankfully, he chose to be born during the afternoon, otherwise I might have missed a show."
The other original cast member was Sandra Burt, now resident in Wellington, whose part is being played this time by Vivienne Laube.
"It's been really great doing this with Vivienne. She's the third member of Dunedin's famous Laube acting family I've worked with, now," MacTavish says.
MacTavish worked with Laube's mother, Margaret, in a 1975 production of The Country Wife and with her brother, Alex Laube, in The Revenger's Tragedy in the early-1990s.
"It's wonderful working with this cast. It feels so experienced and professional and grown-up.
"It's also a chance for Ross and me to have a chance as actors to get the play even better."
Old Times invites the audience to dinner with two women, Kate and Anna, and their male friend, Deeley.
But, the evening darkly spirals as sexuality and unreliable memories entwine.
"There are some things one remembers, even though they never happened," Anna cryptically observes.
"There are things I remember that may never have happened, but as I recall them they take place."
Playwright Harold Pinter alluded to the ethereal and spectral nature of memories in his 1958 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
"There is no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.
"A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false," he said.
"Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour.
"More often than not, you stumble across the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond with the truth.
"But, the real truth is that there is never any such thing as one truth to be found."
See it
Old Times, directed by Lisa Warrington, opens at the Globe Theatre at 8pm tonight and runs till July 5.
A 2pm matinee performance will be held on Sunday.
The Globe is offering an opening night special of $8 a ticket.
