Theater Review: A Bracing Pinter "Betrayal" on Broadway

Betrayal

Written by Harold Pinter

Directed by Jamie Lloyd

Starring Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton, and Tim Hiddleston

Bernard Jacobs Theater, Manhattan

September 18, 2019

Seeing the bracing Betrayal (1978) reminded me of how much we have lost with the death of Harold Pinter (1930-2008). The edgy emotional subtleties and carefully nuanced dialogue among the three characters, each of whom has betrayed at least one of the others sexually or otherwise, is a very different style of theater that what I generally see on Broadway and in London these days. The best, or at least most notable contemporary plays, regardless of the size of the cast, aim for big topics—politics, prejudice, social reform. Their style is more overt, the emotional range wide, more like a Mahler symphony than a Bach fugue. Examples include the big, rowdy The Ferryman (2017), the emotionally overt August, Osage County (2007), and the multilayered, politically and racially provocative Fairview (2018).  Pinter’s work is just the opposite. Over a single act of 90 minutes, on a plain stage with just a few revolving platforms to simulate the passage of time (Kabuki style), we watch three people, clad in simple black, dissect one another. Their words are often less important than their nonverbal communication. In one way, this is oh-so-English, where traditionally small nuances of word choice and inflection were how one made scathing criticism or overt praise, rather using American hyperbole and overstatement. Sadly, the many empty seats in the theater revealed that Pinter’s world may not resonate in ours. That’s too bad.

Betrayal is famed for its reverse chronology (now familiar in film but uncommon before the 1970s), going beyond simple flashbacks to portray events backwards in time. We find out at the start of the play that Emma, a London professional, has told her husband Robert about a past prolonged extramarital affair with his best friend Jerry. Jerry is appalled, thinking this is still a dark secret. Robert says he know about it all along. Are they being truthful? The rest of the play moves backwards in time, using two-character scenes to show us how the three characters got to this point and unfolding their lies to themselves and the others in the triangle. The actors remain costumed and lit in the same way as time changes, and mostly stay in the same character—Pinter does not see people as evolving much over time. As each duo plays out a scene, the other character not speaking remains onstage, lurking in the background, since they too are integral to the dialogue. The three English actors and director Jamie Lloyd (a Pinter expert) were all superb in this and seemed fluent and natural occupying Pinter’s micro-universe. The two male friends Jerry and Robert showed contrasting temperaments: Jerry emotive and guilty, Robert ice cold. Their mutual bed-partner Emma moved back and forth easily between these polarities, and seemed to like not just screwing two men, but experiencing both men’s contrasting personalities. The two men’s friendship verges on homosexual attraction, but never really goes there—this was still the UK in the 1970’s after all.

This play reminded me of how unusual the mid-twentieth century arts were in the context of arts history. After the Renaissance reinvention of simple classical Greek art, art over the centuries became progressively more elaborate and emotive—think the evolution of Romantic harmony, intricate ballet choreography, or elaborate Rococo painting.  But in 1910 or so, the arts suddenly became stripped down, abstract, more laser focused as they were in classical Athens. Picasso and Kandinsky dissolved dimensions and began visual abstraction around 1910. In music, Schoenberg abandoned the ripe, extreme compositions of Puccini and Mahler and even their tonal harmony system around the same time. In dance, the abstract free dance of Isadora Duncan in the 1910’s gave rise to the formal abstract choreography of Martha Graham in the 1920's. In theater, modernism, presaged by Ibsen in 1890's, moved to O’Neill and his abstraction and focus on Freudian psychoanalysis of characters in the 1920’s. All this was really different from the 1800's and earlier centuries. These revolutions dominated the arts for the rest of the twentieth century. If one went to premiere of an important new artwork from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, it would be rare to hear an identifiable melody in classical music, see an identifiable figure in visual art, detect a familiar dance style or narrative in dance, or experience a traditional plot in theater (think Waiting for Godot or The Zoo Story). Film was perhaps more resistant to change, at least popular film, but Ingmar Bergman’s minimally plotted acerbic analyses of human relationships in the 1950’s led to the French new wave and Fellini in the 1960’s, where plot mostly disappeared in a goulash of style. All these trends have been reversed after the turn of our century. Art is now bigger, more overt, more flashy, and more political. It also strikes me as more viewer-narcissistic. Plays are written to reach the viewer and give them an individual message, rather than making us work to enter the artist’s world.

In this context, Pinter is typical of his era, but a bit more traditional. After an initial dark comedic phase, his “memory plays” starting around 1968, of which Betrayal is an example, tend towards few characters, few words, and uncertain timescapes, exploring human relationships with finely crafted, nuanced dialogue. This reminds me very much of what Bergman did in his earlier films, and requires a concentrated focus of the playgoer to get the message. The characters are understandable and the dialogue and motivations are clear. But there is an abstract, laser-like precision in his plays. There are no distractions from his specific, terse, brilliant language—no distracting sets, music, surprise events to take the audience away from concentrating on every word that the actors speak. It’s very much like the difference between adjusting your ears and focusing your brain to a solo cello recital of Bach suites vs. reveling in the wavelike sound stage of a Mahler symphony or a 2010 Esa Pekka Salonen orchestral piece. It also reminded me of the experience of seeing an apparently monochromatic work of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), in which initial boredom is replaced by fascinated, careful viewing of subtle color shifts only seen on close inspection.

Betrayal therefore seemed to me like a work of a foreign, ancient culture, so different was its style and expectations from works after 2000. It was a welcome relief from contemporary excess, rather like the French serving a simple sorbet to cleanse the palate after a rich veal entree. The works of Pinter need regular revival, if only to train our minds to work like laser beams rather than holograms and 360 degree microphones.