Late September 2019
A
word of caution: you may choose not to trust this review—though it isn't
extremely negative by any means, it is far from the glowing rave that has been
the norm to greet this production. The question is not so much whether I'm
right and the others are wrong (or vice versa)—the question is where your
sensibility lies, and which review best speaks to it.
Most know the dramatic conceit behind Harold Pinter's play Betrayal:
it chronicles an extra-marital affair between two people married to others—and
tells the story backwards…sort of. It will proceed chronologically within each
dramatized year of its seven-year time-frame; but it starts with the last year
and works its way to the beginning. In the current West End import revival, the
cheating husband is Charlie Cox, the
cheating wife is Zawe Ashton, and
her cuckolded spouse (and lover's best friend) is Tom Hiddleston.
Unlike most Pinter plays, this one seems not to be
swathed in the usual ambiguities of relationship. For the most part we know
who's who and how they relate to each other. The dialogue contains few if any
of Pinter's signature elliptical pauses and are-they/aren't-they
non sequiturs. But it is a dry affair and he avoids the expected histrionics of
such personal configurations. Its fascination lies with watching how its trio
behave amongst themselves when they are or are not aware of the others'
awareness. The drama lies in how much they choose to reveal, how much they
chose to withhold and how at every given point, we always know more than they
do.
This production, directed by Jamie Lloyd, left me feeling even cooler toward the play than any
of the previous three productions I've seen, and I have to be embarrassingly
candid about why: I was only able to follow it because I knew the material. If
I hadn't, I would have been at sea. And indeed, my companion of the evening was. How is this possible, given the
huzzahs the production has garnered? It's actually hard to explain, but it's a
phenomenon I've seen before: The director and the actors get so caught up in
nuances of staging and strokes of attitude (I don't mean posturing or
overacting), perhaps as a function of re-exploring classic material, that the
overall drive and trajectory of the play becomes subsumed. There's no
cumulative build, and thus you find yourself dropping concentration. You're seeing the play,
hearing it, kind of in a trance with it moment to moment, but suddenly
realizing that you haven't really been following it in a meaningful way. Which
is doubly frustrating, because Mr. Lloyd's production is more stripped down
than most; the bare minimum of furniture in any given scene, and turntable work
to effect time/perspective transitions. You'd think the economy would have you
lasering in on the text, for the lack of distraction; but the economy (which is to say, how it's
delivered) keeps drawing attention to itself as a device. And that pulls you
away from the general arc. At least it did me, and I wasn't alone.
I have to restate, though, that the play typically leaves
me feeling remote and unconcerned in the best
of presentations. And that's because Pinter's Betrayal characters—for all that they are unambiguous—are still,
like those in his more cryptic plays, essences
of characters. They're not really fleshed out, they have very little history or
life outside the narrative, and the text doesn't really tell us that much more.
In fact, at its beginning (which is, of course, the end of the affair) all it
really tells us are the facts of who knew what and when, and how long it has
been going on. The layers of "complexity" as we move backward, have
not to do with revelations of character, but revelations of knowledge. What's
revealed is the game, and how it has been played: the moves of deception, with
little of its psychological or emotional underpinnings.
And in that sense, I suppose, Betrayal is very Pinter.
Because in the end, he still insists on leaving the
defining details up to you…
…and if you don't mind filling in those blanks—or
being intrigued by them—then you may well follow the arc, and find Betrayal as scintillating as I find it
both professionally worthy and viscerally empty…
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