"Betrayal", a play by Harold Pinter, which we saw at the Huntington Theater, Saturday November 24, 2012.
I loved the staging of Betrayal. Each scene is introduced by text announcing the location and time period of the upcoming scene projected onto a black curtain background, the text in an old fashioned serif book font, as if we were watching a silent film. We have a number of brightly lit interior sets (a pub, a comfortable office, a flat) where the three main characters act out, and at the close of each scene the black frame of the stage seems to narrow smaller and smaller until a small frame of the scene remains (not unlike a photographic image being cropped in a darkroom), and then it goes dark. The staging emphasizes the tense focus on the emotional story line animating the characters -- their marital betrayals of each other. Allen Moyer is the Scene Designer.
The three main actors were very good -- Gretchen Egolf as Emma, who looks beautifully English and seems to have a lot going on inside her, Alan Cox as a cunning Jerry, and Mark Dold as an unpredictable and slightly scary Robert.
The play itself gave me mixed emotions. We know what there is to know at the very start of the play -- that Emma has told her husband Robert about the long affair she had with Jerry. Robert and Jerry are supposedly best friends. We go back in time, scene by scene, and watch the affair proceed. So there is no suspense or drama. I began to feel as if Pinter were taking us on a mechanical trip -- I've set up the play to backward in time, and dammit that's what I'm going to do until we get to the beginning! I didn't sense there was much new to learn, or be surprised by, with each earlier scene. And it started to feel boring.
It's not quite boring. But it's something to think about. As with the other Pinter plays we've seen, the impulse that moves people has something to do with the desire to act, to do something (anything), to not be bored, to leave a mark on the world. It's not that Jerry desires Emma as much as he simply desires to feel alive.
Something that bothered me about Jerry -- is he really enough of a magnet for Emma? I mean, he's kind of pudgy and schlumpy and tentative (only when drunk can he profess that he adores her, to trigger their affair). What is there to make her want him in return? I wasn't satisfied with the character, or perhaps with the performance.
And the end -- it comes about 65 minutes after we've started. The whole stage opens up from our tight focus, and we see all the sets, all the scenery in a multi-tiered tableau, all the scenes of these characters' connected lives. I thought something beautiful and wonderful was about to happen. Maybe it did. I couldn't tell. The play ended.
