90 new york |september 16–29, 2019
by the writer’s adjectivized name—f loat
precariously on a dark reservoir of things
unsaid. His characters are like those water
bugs that balance above the depths on the
delicate force of surface tension. He is not
a universal taste, and mediocre Pinter pro-
ductions have their own particular kind of
cringiness: They feel like acting exercises.
Even in sure-footed ventures into the
Pinterverse—such as Jamie Lloyd’s lean
and sexy revival starring Tom Hiddleston,
now visiting New York after its London
premiere—there can be an element of tech-
nical gloss to contend with. You can feel, as
I did, like you’re watching Good Actors
Acting Well, which is a matter of intellect
rather than emotion. Impressive and inter-
esting, yes. Devastating? (Pause.) Well.
Lloyd’s production is cool, confident, and
mercifully aware of Pinter’s sense of humor.
Some of its strongest moments are its
unsmiling jokes, which Lloyd’s actors attack
like fencers, pricking without overextend-
ing. Hiddleston—with his fixed blue stare
and his ability to lock his jaw into a mask of
British propriety, unmistakably under-
girded with menace—is particularly adept
with the playwright’s distinctive rhythms,
his smirks, evasions, and threats. A vapid
conversation between Hiddleston’s charac-
ter, Robert, and his best friend, Jerry (Char-
lie Cox), about whether boy babies are
“more anxious” than girl babies becomes a
master class in hard-edged, straight-faced
comedy. But then the whole play has that
“master class” feel to it: As much as the
phrase has become a critical cliché for a
tour de force, it’s not the same thing as
“masterpiece.” There’s expertise on display,
but there’s an academic distance to it, too.
Part of the distancing effect might be that
Hiddleston undoubtedly outshines his fel-
low actors, who are solid (and equally great-
looking—this is Pinter with highly paid
personal trainers) but never quite as at
home in the material. Cox comes close, and
indeed, his role gives him less of an ability
to stand still and shoot lasers from his eyes,
as Hiddleston gets to. He has to maneuver,
stumble, and course-correct more, and he
does so with a bemused, affable charm that
belies a deeply selfish character. Part of
Betrayal’s fascination is that Jerry, who’s
been having a hidden affair with Robert’s
wife, Emma (Zawe Ashton), for seven years,
is in fact the “Pinter” role. From 1962 to
1969, Pinter himself concealed from his
wife an affair with the BBC presenter Joan
Bakewell. It’s arguable, though, that for all
the playwright’s own experience inside a
dangerous liaison, his play belongs not to
the betrayers but to the betrayed. At least in
Lloyd’s production, Robert—his moment of
awakening and his eventual hardening of
himself as a result—is the heart of the show.
It’s structural—the torturous scene in
which Emma admits the affair to Robert
sits smack-dab in the middle of the play—
but it’s also a matter of actor and director
inclination. As Robert learns the truth
about Jerry and Emma, Hiddleston sits
stone still and silently weeps until the snot
hangs in ropes from his nose. There were
quiet gasps in my audience when it started
to drip, unheeded by this broken man in his
moment of crisis. “Ah. Yes. I thought it
might be something like that, something
along those lines,” says Robert, with
extreme Britishness, when Emma con-
fesses—but there’s so much raw emotion
pulsing underneath Hiddleston’s perfor-
mance, and overflowing its container in this
one pivotal scene, that the character can’t
help but become Betrayal’s tragic center.
The way Hiddleston plays Robert, it’s diffi-
cult to believe it when Emma tells Jerry,
“You know what I found out ... last night?
He’s betrayed me for years. He’s had ...
other women for years.”
Despite the real power of Hiddleston’s
performance, that empathy gap strikes me
as a flaw. We can’t quite take Emma at her
word (we’ve also heard her lie on other
important matters), and so the scales of
Lloyd’s production end up tipped rather
than balanced. It seems to be a play about a
victim and two perpetrators—but I think it’s
a play about three people, all of whom we
should empathize with, all of whom we
should mistrust, all of whom are capable of
great selfishness. Ashton has the hardest
job: Emma’s got that sense of mystery about
her that sometimes happens when men,
even very talented men, write women. The
scenes between Robert and Jerry, though
often tense and terse, feel lived, red-blooded,
affectionate. Emma often seems ethereal—her motivations and actual desires some-
how far away. (For a real bust-up of that
trope, read the highly compelling essay
Bakewell wrote about her affair with Pinter
for Britain’s the Telegraph—there’s no mys-
tery woman there; instead there’s a super-
smart Cambridge grad who was expected to
become a housewife and mother at 25.) The
character is already the most opaque in the
play, and Ashton’s performance doesn’t do
much to elucidate her. Tall and willowy,
with bare feet and a dancer’s limbs, she
tucks her hair behind her ears, tilts her head
and half-smiles. It’s clear she likes Jerry’s
attention, but it’s not clear where her own
deep hungers lie. Lloyd has her leaning into
the enigmatic aura Pinter gave Emma, and
it renders Ashton less visceral and—this is
the real problem—less sympathetic than
her male counterparts.
Still, Lloyd’s stripped-to-the-bone
approach to the play’s environment lets the
text breathe and stretch. We can really
hear Pinter’s words pinging off the big
blank wall of Soutra Gilmour’s set, with its
neutral palette and vast, clean emptiness
that put us in mind of the art gallery where
Emma works. In this white box, the three
actors move like dark ghosts, memories of
themselves with all the clutter stripped
away. They turn slowly on a big revolve,
and, crucially, Lloyd keeps all three
onstage throughout, so that the shadow
presence of the third always inf luences
scenes between the other two. The staging
restores some of the balance that’s lost in
the performances. It brings back the sense
that any affair, especially one that involves
friends, is in fact a triangle and that out at
the corners of such a hard, angular form,
even in our desperate f light from loneli-
ness, we’re more isolated than ever. ■To m
Hiddleston
and Zawe
Ashton.