Word: pinter
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BETRAYAL is a chess match masquerading as a play: Harold Pinter's latest occasion for us to play mind games with his characters. These characters are Emma (Jenny Agutter), her husband Robert (Paul Benedict), and his best friend Jerry (Richard Jordan '60), and the situation is a seven-year affair between Jerry and Emma. In Robert, Emma and Jerry we have intellectuals creating worlds in their heads to avoid the consequences of their behavior. They think they can limit the moral dimensions of their actions by controlling the flow of information...
...Pinter abandons the usual tools for needling and prodding an audience into adopting new ideas. His story does not unfold slowly, but weaves backwards, beginning in 1977 and ending in '68 (the skips are irregular: this is not a "flash back each year on Christmas to see how far they've come" manipulation of time). There are no dramatic peaks and valleys, no aesthetically pleasing beginning, middle and end. Gone, too, are the conventional techniques of characterization. Real people, with blood running through their veins, would detract from Pinter's concern with the purely intellectual. Jerry, Emma and Robert...
BECAUSE IT IS the audience's and not the actors' job to analyze characters, actors as competent as Agutter, Benedict and Jordan face a frustrating task. Pinter withholds from them even conversation as an outlet for creative interpretation. The dialogue is slow and choppy, meant to give the audience information without letting word choice and phrasing reveal additional insight into the speakers. Characters rarely utter more than four words at a time, and there are precious few monologues. Benedict, Jordan and Agutter too often let the unexpected eye contact, the strained embrace, the angry removal of a tablecloth...
...Pinter probably has fewer women in his dramas than any other major modern playwright. When they do appear, they are almost invariably presented as mothers or whores. In his superbly crafted and deeply felt The Homecoming, he merged both roles in the sibylline central figure of Ruth. In that sense Betrayal is a dramatically interesting departure, for Emma is not really a mother/whore character. It is also a mettlesome test for Blythe Danner, who is one of the most formidably gifted younger actresses on the U.S. stage. Otherwise, Betrayal, which contains the most pauses of any Pinter play, is something...
...Deftly, Tynan puts his judgment of Stoppard in the book's foreword: "A uniquely inventive playwright who has more than once been within hailing distance of greatness." The piece itself is an adulatory delight, especially a scene in which Stoppard emerges as a game-saving hero of Harold Pinter's cricket team after Pinter and his lover, Lady Antonia Fraser, retire to a nearby pub to avoid a confrontation with Pinter's wife...