"Pauses, Poses, and Pinter"
In the 1960s, British playwright Harold Pinter (1930-2008),
who went on to earn a Nobel Prize, was married to actress Vivien Merchant but
having a seven-year fling with BBC-TV personality Joan Bakewell. This personal experience
was one of several important influences on his 1978 drama about marital
infidelity, Betrayal, now receiving its fourth (and, possibly, best)
Broadway production since 1980. |
| Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton, Tom Hiddleston. All photos: Mark Brenner. |
For the current, limited-run, revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs
Theatre, which originated earlier this year during London’s Pinter at the
Pinter season, the biggest name among the English leads is Tom Hiddleston (Loki in the Avengers
movies), who plays Robert. This is not to say his bright costars, Zawe
Ashton (Velvet Buzzsaw) as Emma and Charlie Cox (Philip, Duke of
Crowborough on “Downton Abbey”) is Jerry, are in any way diminished by his charismatic
presence. They play their roles with the diamond-cutting precision of master jewelers.
But that is still not enough to convince me that Betrayal
is more substance than style. In fact, the brilliance of the acting here in
Jamie Lloyd’s unconventionally minimalist, finely tuned staging only serves to
emphasize the play’s technical glitter over its emotional heartbeat. In the
interest of brevity, allow me to adapt the capsule summary of the plot from my
review of the 2013 production.
It tells the story of how, in 1968, Jerry, a literary
agent (Pinter’s avatar), a married man and father, falls for and begins
his affair with Emma. She is the gallery-owning wife of Robert, a
publisher who is Jerry’s closest friend (his best man, in
fact). The affair lasts seven years and ends in 1975. For much of the time, the
lovers conduct their clandestine romance in a rented flat. Meanwhile, Robert begins
his own affair, as does Jerry’s wife, Judith. A coda, set in 1977, two years
after the affair ends, brings the former lovers together at a pub, and Emma
reveals that she is now involved with another writer, one of Jerry’s clients
whose publisher is Robert.
What makes this otherwise straightforward tale of adulterous
love, male bonding and deception, and scratched memories (à la Proust) intriguing
is its backward chronology, with the 1977 post-affair coda actually being the
first scene, and with the play then proceeding to eight scenes set,
respectively, in 1975, 1974, 1973, 1971, and 1968 (1977 has two scenes and
1973 has 3).
And what makes this production intriguing is its abandonment
of realistic scenery in favor of an essentially bare stage, designed by Soutra
Gilmour, using only a couple of chairs, and very few other props. Instead of
recognizable locales, we see a low, beige, color-textured wall running straight
across the upstage area beneath a black ceiling in which multiple, embedded
lighting strips run parallel to the wings. Jon Clark’s exceptional lighting paints
the background with a mood-enhancing palette, casting the actors’ razor-sharp silhouettes
on the wall, as well as varying the spatial feeling with shuttering effects.
 |
| Charlie Cox. |
In line with this spare, visual restraint are both Pinter’s remarkably
polite, reticent, outburst-free script and the actors themselves, each model-slender,
wearing the same clothing throughout, their every movement calibrated for
effect. Lloyd creates an almost Becketian world in which each gesture, twist of
the leg, or crook of the neck--even the way Robert eats a meal--seems choreographed for imagistic impact, almost as if you could take a picture of
any moment and get a Vogue-worthy shot. Ashton’s Emma seems especially prone to
standing in ways that seem more poses than positions.
 |
| Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox, Tom Hiddleston. |
Souter’s perfectly-tailored
costumes further enhance the physical attractiveness, Robert’s black garb balanced
by Jerry’s grayish jacket, with the principal source of color being Emma, the
triangle’s pulse, perpetually barefooted in an elegant, high-shouldered, blue,
silk blouse and slightly bell-bottomed jeans.
Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton, Tom Hiddleston.
Duologues are performed, often with those involved sitting
in spindle-backed wooden chairs as the third member of the trio remains upstage,
near the wall, present but not present, a constant reminder of his or her
significance to the others in the layered strata of betrayal. And while the set
may be ultrasimple-looking, it’s actually mechanically complex, using
slow-moving concentric turntables that allow the chairs and actors to circle in
opposite directions to fascinating effect.
 |
| Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton. |
The tall, high-cheekboned Hiddleston, a classically-trained
actor who has starred as Hamlet and Coriolanus, is in his element, as are his colleagues,
in digging into Pinter’s pregnant pauses, elliptical sentences, and subtextual
currents. Lloyd’s direction exploits the playwright’s mannerisms for all they’re
worth, and the stage is often electric with unspoken thoughts and repressed
feelings.
 |
| Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox. |
But, over the course of 90 minutes, the plot’s revelations
gradually lose power because, after all, the backward trajectory has begun by telling
us the result of what has already happened and whose origins the play is
seeking to uncover. There are few surprises in store in such a pattern, everything
that transpires seeming only to put us on a path of diminishing returns.
Betrayal is getting a first-class revival here,
interestingly directed and designed, and played with just the kind of knowing
reserve, cutting psychological insight, and brittle wit great British acting
can provide. Every ounce of meaning would seem to have been squeezed from the
dramatic tube. Yet, in this coolly sophisticated,
bitingly cerebral environment, the result is more head than heart, or, as I suggested
before, more style than substance. All things considered, however, it’s definitely
the best of my three Betrayals.
Bernard J. Jacobs Theatre
242 W. 45th St., NYC
Through December 7
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