Theatre review: Betrayal

I've seen Pinter's Betrayal twice before, most recently eight years ago in the same theatre that's since been named after the playwright, and where it returns now; Jamie Lloyd's light touch with Pinter's work makes this probably the best production of it I've seen. Lloyd's Pinter at the Pinter season was meant to have ended with Pinter Seven, but whether it turned out they'd leased the building for longer than intended, or that Tom Hiddleston was interested in taking part and could put some bums on seats, his company have added this one last run to the bill, the one-act play about a love triangle with its famous reverse-chronology structure. Zawe Ashton plays gallery owner Emma, whose marriage to Robert (Hiddleston) is ending after he admitted to cheating on her; in a night-long heart-to-heart, she retaliated by confessing she'd had a seven-year affair with his best friend Jerry.

At least this is the version of the story she tells Jerry (Charlie Cox) when she sees him at the opening of her latest show, two years after their own relationship ended.

But when Jerry confronts Robert to find out where their friendship stands, he discovers that Emma has lied to him, and in fact told her husband about the affair four years earlier, while it was still going on. For his own inscrutable reasons, Robert decided to continue their friendship all that time, never letting on that he knew anything (although Jerry is a bit slow on the uptake, something I'm not sure if I'd noticed as much in past productions.) We then jump back in time to the end of the affair, back again to when Robert actually found out about it, through the years when it had become a permanent fixture of Jerry and Emma's lives, and eventually its beginning at a party.

The play debuted in 1978 and is set in the decade leading up to that, but Lloyd has taken all the specifics out to put the action in an almost dreamlike setting that could be the '70s or today (except for the fact that Jerry and Emma can afford to buy A WHOLE OTHER FLAT in Kilburn just to occasionally bang in.) The large revolving box of the previous shows is gone, Soutra Gilmour replacing it with a nondescript pastel room with the bare minimum props, and a sparingly-used double revolve - and is there a more classic use for a double revolve than to have characters pulled apart? But the production's true star might be lighting designer Jon Clark, as there's many times when you find yourself watching the shadows interact more than the actors themselves. It's part of a dreamlike tone that highlights how much the story takes place in the bubble created by the affair: For all that we hear a lot about the characters' work and lives, we really don't get to know much about Robert and Emma's marriage, and whether it has any pressures beyond their infidelities.

Pinter wrote a lot of dark comedies but Lloyd seems particularly good at bringing to the fore the funny moments in his more heartfelt plays as well - like the games of squash whose significance appear to be a private joke only Robert understands, while Hiddles' most notable scene has him drunk at lunch after finding out at the affair, attacking both a melon and a waiter with bizarre ferocity. Ashton is a dab hand at a withering put-down but also carries the weariness of the whole situation that the two men appear to be ploughing straight through. The production also makes the reverse chronology feel essential, not gimmicky, as the multiple small betrayals get revealed more clearly this way. The title Betrayal for a play about an affair would seem to have an obvious meaning, but the play's great irony is the way the smaller everyday deceptions sometimes hit home more sharply than the one big one.

Betrayal by Harold Pinter is booking until the 1st of June at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.