Betrayal Review: The Actors Are the Thing, the Stage-Craft Not So Much

Jamie Lloyd’s gauzy new production of Harold Pinter’s play aims for the abstractly lyrical.

Betrayal
Photo: Marc Brenner

There’s no possibility of poetry in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Best known through its four Broadway productions in as many decades for its clipped exchanges and rewinding timeline, this anatomy of an affair strives to present life and conversations as they really are. (Walter Kerr’s original Broadway review shrewdly called the dialogue “vodka-dry.”)

But Jamie Lloyd’s gauzy new production—like the original, a West End transfer—aims for the abstractly lyrical. The mundane locales—a pub where former lovers reconnect, the cheap flat where infidelity blossoms, a bedroom where the dalliance sparks—all dissolve in the largely empty space, designed by Soutra Gilmour and featuring little more than a pair of chairs. Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton, and Charlie Cox, all directed to take 10-second pauses between most of their lines, float on turntables in counter-clockwise patterns around each other as the play moves them back and back and back in time. The underscoring—including a Vivaldi aria, a cover of “Enjoy the Silence,” and, bizarrely, three instrumentals from the Gone Girl soundtrack—similarly unmoors the play from any practical sense of time and space.

That disorientation is offset, though, by the whip-smart and sometimes bitterly funny performances of Hiddleston and Cox as, respectively, the wronged husband and his backstabbing best friend. Hiddleston’s Robert follows his most biting lines with a half-grimace, half-smile that becomes a toothier, more playful grin as the timeline moves backward. Robert’s furious when the play begins, but he’s also bemused at his friend Jerry’s total lack of self-awareness: The ultimate betrayal, Jerry suggests, is Robert keeping his knowledge of the affair to himself. Cox captures Jerry’s confused self-interest convincingly.

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There’s an unvarying rhythm to Lloyd’s production, and treating every moment with the same dynamic and tempo—a mezzo-piano adagio, perhaps—makes Betrayal feel ever so slightly like a rehearsal-room exercise. Moments of brilliance do emerge from this elongation, like the electric spaces in one critical conversation between Robert and Emma in which Ashton’s eyes, so darting, shimmering, and wincing, work a mile a minute to convey rich, unspoken monologues. But that halting pacing starts to become monotonous, especially as Pinter pushes further back in time. The early scenes, as characters contemplate years of memories, get room to breathe, but those later ones, which take place before the trio considers the consequences of their actions, lack much sense of impulsive urgency.

Lloyd traffics, too, in bold-lettered symbols that tend to underestimate the psychological clarity of the characters’ sparse lines and the audience’s capacity for reading between them. We know the walls are closing in without needing to see the actual walls closing in. If the heavy-handed stagecraft (they’re drifting apart, literally!) isn’t an out-and-out betrayal of the actors’ self-sufficient performances, it’s not a great show of trust either.

Most of Pinter’s scenes play out as duets, but Lloyd keeps the absent figure in the emotional triangle always on stage, lurking, sometimes very close by, as a constant reminder of the third vertex of that triangle. Highlighting Emma as the odd one out during the tensely buddy-buddy scenes between Robert and Jerry emphasizes the possibility of an unspoken attraction between the two men. It’s not necessarily just a play about two friends competing for the same woman, and Lloyd even seems to hint at times that Robert knowingly allows Emma’s dalliance to develop as a sort of proxy for his own longing. Usually, though, Hiddleston and Cox seem to resist Lloyd’s choices that lean in that direction. There’s probably more depths to be plumbed from Robert’s sour jibe at his wife: “To be honest I’ve always liked him rather more than I’ve liked you. Maybe I should have had an affair with him myself.”

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There’s something vaporous, too, in Ashton’s performance, except for that one riveting scene with Hiddleston. Pinter told the New York Times back in 1979, when Betrayal was first opening on Broadway, that “the play is about a nine-year relationship between two men who are best friends” and the character of Emma still hasn’t fully recovered from that authorial oversight. Ashton seems more of the fuzzy, airy world of Lloyd’s imagination, at least when up against the grounded, affably quotidian men created by Hiddleston and Cox.

From the way she positions herself, legs splayed over her chair almost at 180 degrees like a praying mantis, to the carefully maintained indifference in her voice, Ashton’s Emma anxiously constructs the version of herself she wants to show the world, or, at least, the two men who seem to take up so much of it. In the final scene, we see her surveying herself in the mirror, perfecting that image, but Ashton never totally transcends Emma’s pawn-like purpose in the play or conveys what she’s hiding behind the veneer.

It’s that kind of fogginess that finally makes this production only intermittently memorable and rarely revelatory. The extraordinary acting moments tend to arrive in spite of Lloyd’s vision for the play rather than because of it. But when they do—in Hiddleston’s smile or Cox’s lazy swig of beer or Ashton’s pulsating eyes—they form a set of memories worth rewinding.

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Betrayal is now playing at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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