Thom Yorke writes the music for Pinter's Old Times on Broadway

Thom Yorke has written the score for Roundabout Theatre Company's Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times, the company announced on 12 August. It is his first work for the theatre. The play runs at the American Airlines Theatre in New York, with previews from 17 September, an opening on 6 October and a last night on 29 November.

Douglas Hodge directs, his Broadway debut as a director (he won a Tony as an actor for La Cage aux Folles). It was Hodge who brought Yorke in; Yorke had seen his production of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter in Oxford in 2004. Clive Owen, also new to Broadway, stars with Eve Best and Kelly Reilly.

Old Times is about a husband and wife waiting for a visit from her roommate of 20 years before, a woman the husband says he never met. Their memories of her clash until they become a quiet fight for power. I've enjoyed exploring through music the script's themes of love and memory as well as Pinter's rhythms, twists and turns.¹

The score took shape over six months of emails, Hodge told The New York Times. He would describe an image and ask for it in music. It describes a ribbon of light on the horizon. Can you do that?² Yorke would write back “Got it” and send something. Much of it was made on 1970s synthesisers to belong to the decade of the play, which Pinter wrote in 1971. In the theatre the music is heard as the show begins and ends and between the scenes, and Yorke does not mean to perform it live.

Hodge says the score works backwards and forwards, playing with time and repetition the way Pinter does, and he hopes it brings a new kind of theatregoer to the play. The last thing he'd want is that it becomes a Thom Yorke show.²