68 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
The director Jamie Lloyd strips bare Pinter’s love-triangle-told-backward.
THE THEATRE
HERE AND NOW
A revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” and anti-vaxxers in “Eureka Day.”
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
I
n many great dramatic texts, talk pins
us to specifics. Tics of speech sprout
up, as if organically, from the political
contingencies and the geographical facts
that give rise to character. A wonderful
feature of the theatre is that, from one
production of a work to the next, those
verbal bursts can attach to new applica-
tions, sending their signals off to meet
new satellites of place and time. The
word “revival” becomes literal: let’s make
this thing live again, but differently.
Yet in the latest revival of Harold
Pinter’s “Betrayal,” written in 1978 and
now on Broadway at the Bernard B. Ja-
cobs Theatre, the director, Jamie Lloyd,
declines this opportunity, to disorient-
ing effect. Instead of setting Pinter’s love-
triangle-told-backward amid freshly sug-
gestive surroundings, Lloyd strips the
production bare, leaving the play to speak
in a near-vacuum, a head without a body.
Emma (Zawe Ashton) and Jerry
(Charlie Cox) have carried on an affair
for seven years; Robert (Tom Hid-
dleston), Emma’s husband and Jerry’s
good friend, hasn’t been as much in the
dark as Jerry thinks. The play unshrouds
itself in bars and restaurants, at Emma
and Robert’s house, and at the “home”
to which Jerry and Emma retreat on fur-
tive afternoons. Lloyd shrugs these lo-
cations loose, and instead places a mar-
bled white wall behind his players and
gives them the barest props. The actors
move around a few wooden chairs. A
folding table set lovingly in the secret
apartment becomes, in the next scene, a
two-top for a boozily charged, crypti-
cally combative lunch between Jerry and
Robert. The whole thing might be hap-
pening in a back hallway of a museum.
Indeed, the characters here seem a bit
like objects on display. On such a naked
stage, their heads cast uncanny shadows
against that bare wall—the wall some-
times moves; stage depth and lighting
are the only real sources of visual vari-
ance—and the shadows, often motion-
less when the actors are stuck in one of
Pinter’s pauses, look like statuary mon-
uments to impermanent emotional states.
Early in the play, Jerry, having a go
at Emma for her conversational rusti-
ness after a two-year absence, says, “You
remember the form. I ask about your
husband, you ask about my wife.” That
line becomes a synecdoche for Lloyd’s
entire undertaking: “Betrayal” itself be-
comes a kind of form; the implication
of its placelessness is that its tangle of
iffy loves and fading affections is an ever-
unfolding human pattern, occurring not
only in England in the nineteen-seven-
ties, where Pinter placed it, but every-
where and all the time. Unanchored from
the world that helped birth it, the play
becomes a parable. Pinter’s time-bound
references—to skillful letter writers and
long holidays spent without thought to
telephonic communication—chafe.
Another effect of this contextual an-
tigravity is a new focus on the charac-
ters less as people than as types. Jerry is
a literary agent; Robert is a publisher;
Emma runs an art gallery—everybody’s
close to art but not quite making it. Run-
ning referentially through the play is a
writer named Casey, represented by Jerry
and published by Robert, and, eventu-
ally, “seeing a bit of ” Emma, who’s finally
crawling away from the wreck of her
marriage and marriage-like affair. I’d
never before found the recurrent utter-
ances of Casey’s name so funny, or so
trenchant concerning Jerry and Robert’s
shared parasitism—Robert calls Jerry
“quite talented at uncovering talent.”
These men, “friends” who maintain con-
tact through professional orbits but never
seem to achieve lasting intimacy, have
taken their attitudes toward the likes of
Casey and, unwittingly, applied them to
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKKEL SOMMER
