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| Betrayal
Theatre Royal, Bath & Duchess Theatre, London 2003 |
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Designed by John Gunter Lighting by Peter Mumford Sound by Gregory Clarke Janie Dee as Emma Aden Gillett as Jerry Hugo Speer as Robert James Supervia as Waiter |
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| Financial Times - Friday 10th
October 2003 Actors often have to face the challenge of growing older on stage, but in Harold Pinter's Betrayal they have an even more difficult task: they have to grow younger as the play progresses. Pinter's play tracks the course of an affair, but it does so backwards: it opens with a meeting between the two lovers some years after the affair ended; it finishes with the first erotically charged encounter between the two, nine years earlier. The performers have to chart the stages in the affair, discarding the layers of guilt, to become the younger, fresher. <br> In Peter Hall's fine revival the three actors manage this beautifully: from Hugo Speer's brittle, tight-lipped husband, Robert, emerges as a chipper young man; Aden Gillett's Jerry loses his air of rumpled regret to reveal an ardent, impulsive wooer; Janie Dee, meanwhile, in an excellent performance that drives the play, wriggles free from her character's bruised wisdom to become a girlishly lovely young woman. These performances emphasise how the play's structure makes the story even more poignant: we see all too clearly the price for the characters' betrayal. |
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| The play asks one big question - if
you knew where a move would lead would you still make it? - and many
smaller ones: about who betrays whom, about memory and blame. For
the betrayal of the title works on many levels: the play's structure
allows the audience to see the many tiny acts of deception that the
bigger one involves. When Jerry and Robert meet for a boozy lunch,
for instance, we know that the husband knows about the affair, but
that the lover does not know he knows. And so the lies that erode
their close friendship as well as the marriage emerge. Hall directed the play's premier 25 years ago, and this revival is finely tuned as you might expect. Hall and his cast make us see that while Emma might need the two very different men, they also need each other. They suggest, paradoxically, that the very betrayals that destroy them also bind them - for a while. And so the production feels its way through the many ambiguities of this bitter comedy. Sarah Hemming |
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| The Guardian – Thursday
11th October 2003 Gender politics in Hall's Pinter revival. Pinter's Betrayal was seen at Bath this summer in tandem with Design for Living. But Peter Hall's production arrives in the West End sadly shorn or the Coward. It also has to contend with the usual grisly first-night crowd with its ringing phones and hacking coughs. Fortunately both it and Pinter's play are strong enough to survive the ill-mannered mob. Having dismissed Pinter's play at its 1978 premiere, I have spent the last quarter-century catching up with it. Each time I see it I discover something new in this story of multiple betrayal which reverses conventional chronology. It starts in the present with the wonderfully edgy pub reunion of ex-lovers, Emma and Jerry. As time's arrow speeds backwards over the previous nine years, we see the cumulative nature of betrayal: not only has Emma's husband, Robert, concealed his knowledge of the affair from Jerry, his best friend, but has also used his cuckoldry as an alibi for his own liaisons. What I got from Peter Hall's probing production is that this is also a play about memory and about differing male-female expectations. Each encounter in the play is shadowed by the past: there's a bitterly funny lunch between the two men when Jerry's musky memory of Emma's sensuality is matched by Robert's stinging discovery of this wife's infidelity. But what makes the play more than an ironic game is Pinter's compassionate awareness of gender differences: I'd never before realised how much Emma treats the Kilburn love nest as a second home, whereas for Jerry it is a sexy escape from domesticity. The power of the past is visibly registered in John Gunter's composite set, with its background of books, bikes, squash rackets and street signs: all referred to in the text. Janie Dee's glowing performance reminds us that Emma is the play's central figure. There's a heart-stopping moment in the pivotal Venetian scene when Dee stares fixedly at a novel, knowing that Robert has discovered her secret. But, as the play moves back in time she beautifully sheds guilt and stress like a snake sloughing its skin. Hugo Speer as Robert skilfully conveys outward insouciance masking bafflement and hurt: at one point he turns on Emma with brutal misogyny which suggests his dignity as been wounded. Aden Gillett subtly reminds us that Jerry is both the prime mover and the ultimate outsider in these marital manoeuvres. But this is precisely what gives Pinter's play its lasting power: the realisation that everyone is a victim in the complex mathematics of betrayal. Michael Billington |
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