Programme Cover
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Betrayal, The National Theatre,
The Lyttelton Theatre, London,
24 November 1998
Jerry - Douglas Hodge
Emma - Imogen Stubbs
Robert - Anthony Calf
Waiter - Arturo Venegas
Directed by Trevor Nunn
Designer - Es Devlin
Lighting Designer - Rick Fisher
Video Designer - Chris Laing
Music - Roger Eno
Review by Kate Kellaway
One of Harold Pinter’s techniques in his short
but never sweet play, Betrayal, is to take a verb, especially
a verb such as 'to think', or 'to know' and fondle it, tease it,
let it take over speech ('I think I thought you knew' etc) until
our heads are echoing and 'to know' has become to mean something
equivocal and dicey: not knowing enough, not knowing at all. Adultery
is the perfect subject for this sort of linguistic unease, often
present in Pinter’s plays in less charged conditions.
Trevor Nunn’s production of Betrayal
is stylish, tense and disquieting. It is about a temporal triangle
(love at the mercy of time and measured in years). There is a sense
of something rotten but unspoken between the three main players.
Is it a sense that betrayal must continue, even when confessed to?
Imogen Stubbs plays Emma, a woman stuck in
a state of social grace. She is better suited to the making of love-nests
than to the dismantling of them. In the last stages of her affair
and after it has ended, she looks like a chic mourner. But although
she wears black, she lacks Chekhovian depth. Her voice is high,
elegiac, actressy (people turn into actors under strain). She has
a sad, clown look which surprisingly enhances her prettiness. When
she meets her ex-lover Jerry for a drink (the play's time scheme
is ironically scrambled, its opening the beginning of the end),
she is nervously approval-seeking. She has a no-room-at-the-inn
look, her smile unable to stay anywhere. When she and Jerry were
first together, she was in full flower; she wore scarlet and tourquoise
and there was no need to ask, as she does now, ever more emptily,
'How are you?'
Jerry (Douglas Hodge) talks like a barrow-boy
made good; he is a bit of rough to her smooth. He does not seem
quite believable at first too philistine, too staccato but becomes
gradually more convincing (incidentally, he looks uncannily like
the young Pinter). Jerry’s emotions are not for expressing, except
when drunk, contemplating Emma in her turquoise sheath of a dress
at the beginning of their affair.
The men seem to care more about their friendships
with each other than about Emma. Robert (Anthony Calf) is the most
mysterious of the three. He talks like a doctor, though his bedside
manner does not reassure. He is in an Italian hotel when he discovers
that Emma and Jerry have been having an affair. There is something
strinkingly unnatural and alarming about the way he stands at a
little distance from the fancy Florentine double bed with his arms
motionless at his side. Emma is pretending to read. She trembles
until her book looks like a trapped bird. He is still as a waiting
cat.
There is light relief in wonderfully comic
dialogue, especially where the talk is not so much small as stunted.
I loved the dead-end debate about why baby boys are born anxious.
Es Devlin's set consists of a conjectural house that converts to
a screen against which black-and-white images run like a river.
It is an unconsoling design and suits the play. Betrayal
is fiercely filleted without the mercy that love between the characters
might bring: adultery in X-ray.
The Observer, 29th November 1998
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