Camden New Journal - Theatre: Betrayal

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The Review - THEATRE by ILLTYD HARRINGTON
Published: 7 June 2007

Perfectly paced Pinter, complete with pauses

BETRAYAL
Donmar Warehouse

THE programme has three pages listing the rich and diverse career of Harold Pinter. Actor; 29 plays; 20 screenplays; poet; director; 17 honorary doctorates; a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2005. From the charge of obscurity and long causes in the script he has become the voice of the human condition. A writer held in almost saintly reverence.
Betrayal, written in 1978, has an unusual theatrical device – it opens in 1977 and reels back to 1968, a story of adultery or, more prosaically, sex in the afternoon.
Jerry (Toby Stephens) a literary agent has a long affair with his best friend’s wife Emma (Dervla Kirwan). Robert (Sam West) is her publisher husband. Jerry buys a flat in darkest Kilburn for their triste.
Discussing their successful deception Jerry says “it was brilliant – no one went to Kilburn those days”.
Stephens returns to the stage after his villainously morphed career in Bond’s Die Another Day and his darkly romantic Rochester in BBC’s Jane Eyre.
After three years he returns and brings force and authority to Jerry. He remains one of our more watchable and intelligent stage actors. Kirwan’s Emma is outwardly prim and proper – at one stage arriving in their love nest with a laced cloth from a Venetian holiday with her husband. She neatly covers their luncheon table.
But she leads Jerry to the bed of copulation with the determination of a ruthless prioress. Robert in Sam West’s hands is more Parsonic than passionate. At one stage he says he should have fallen in love with Jerry. At the end Emma runs an art gallery – what else?
And their story of deception and sexual gratification moves on to the plane of bleak realisation, another example of Pinter’s mastery of realism as well as worrying fantasy. Their prosaic exit is proceeded by a practical question: what will we do with the furniture? Well perhaps you should rent it out.
Roger Michell directs the 90 minutes at the right pace and yes the famous Pinter pauses too. William Dudley’s design is as ever excellent, literally fitting it around the text. Our great poet John Milton wrote All Passion Spent and Graham Greene a novel The End of the Affair – appropriate titles here perhaps? But we know Betrayal is the actual story of a writer and a playwright and dame of BBC television. All you can be sure of is that somewhere in the Metropolis an affair is beginning and ending today. This affair is sold out.
Until July 21
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