Word: pinter
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There's a lot of posturing in director Woody Hill's staging of Harold Pinter's Betrayal. Rather too much posturing, actually. Given an intriguing theme and an even more intriguing framework within which to stage the play, Hill opts for a stark presentation suffused in its own bitterness. The director seems to strike a flat emotional pitch in all the players of this production, and most emotional nuances are, as a result, lost. In Betrayal, rigid staging unfortunately replaces audience interpretation with directorial determinism...
...Harold Pinter...
...whatever the directorial interpretation, Betrayal remains a riveting play. This is largely due to the regressive action; Pinter begins at the end and shifts backwards through time. The nine scenes in Betrayal trace the collapse, decline, and eventual establishment of an affair between Jerry (John Ducey) and Emma (Reid Cottingham), the wife of Jerry's best friend Robert (Glenn Kiser...
Another intriguing aspect of Pinter's script is the various levels at which the characters "betray" each other and their attitudes towards betrayal in general. Kiser's Robert viciously internalizes the bitterness which the affair has engendered in him, but refuses to acknowledge it in himself. He maintains an outwardly stable friendship with Jerry, meeting him regularly for lunch. At the same time, he issues a misogynist tirade about "girl babies" that is a thinly veiled attack on Emma. Kiser's tense, self-controlled performance is inarguably the show's most memorable...
HEAT OF THE DAY (PBS, Sept. 30, 9 p.m. on most stations). For those who like their mysteries solved in one evening, Michael Gambon plays a suspicious stranger who latches on to a divorcee in World War II London, in this Masterpiece Theater drama scripted by Harold Pinter...