Perfect Pinter

Betrayal – Harold Pinter

The State Theatre Company of South Australia

The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre

19-22 August

Betrayal features a tight love-triangle with a hypotenuse that stretches and contracts depending on the lengths of the legs. It is highly geometric, down to the circling set which turns clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on whether the scene changes forwards or backwards in time. It’s really not that difficult to keep track, however, because the story is perfectly told through the strength of the acting and direction (Geordie Brookman).

Emma (Alison Bell) is married to Robert (Mark Saturno), but she has an affair with Jerry (Nathan O Keefe), his best friend. It seems that everyone is being betrayed by someone else – who knew about the betrayal and when they knew it is one of the issues of the play. Even though the play only features the three main protagonists (and a formidable cameo by John Maurice as a waiter whose exuberance stops just the right side of hyperbole), every action causes concentric ripples which threaten to break out of the circle.

The set and lighting (designed by Geoff Cobham) is taught and claustrophobic. Half of the set is backed by slats which resemble vertical blinds (or fly paper) and through which the lights blaze in the stylistic scene changes. These highlight the trapped atmosphere of a cage or a blood-letting arena where gladiators goad each other. It also provides a break (both for the actors and the audience) from the relentless realism of the nine scenes and the awkward, tense dialogue.

The script is as pure as you would expect from Pinter and is beautifully enunciated from the ennui and the casual laughter to the spitting out of words in a calculated attempt to wound. The famous Pinteresque pauses and silences are captured masterfully; in a Q&A session after the show the actors explained that Brookman directed them to hold the pauses until it became physically uncomfortable not to speak, and this is executed with aplomb.

Nothing looks particularly fun or erotic in this sexual entanglement. There is barely a touch or an embrace, and when Emma and Robert are on a supposedly romantic holiday in Venice, the bed is representatively hard and forbidding, and the couple remain determinedly at either end without contact. The depth and misery in many sections makes one question why anyone enters into such a liaison in the first place, although there is a hint of promise at the end of the play (which is the start of the affair), but we know the spark of excitement will soon be extinguished.

The brilliance of this play is that there are no glib answers or explanations, as this scenario is both specific to the characters involved, and expands to include the commonality of human experience. The characters tell each other lies and the audience learns different versions of their stories; from whether they caught a speedboat and read Yeats on Torcello, to in whose kitchen a child was thrown up in the air and caught in a slightly scary game.

It’s really about the men and their relationship to each other: they have long boozy lunches and play squash, a game which was a 1970s metaphor for alpha-male testosterone, played in a walled court with no open sides, and completely dependent upon angles and the impact of ricochets. When Robert tells Emma that he has always preferred Jerry to her and thinks perhaps he should have had an affair with him instead, it is not merely an attempt to hurt her, but a thinly-veiled truth. This is a man’s world after all –it was written by a man in 1978 – where a woman is a man’s possession.

Jerry is also married (to Judith) and, although we hear a lot about her, she is never shown nor are her feelings ever really considered, which makes it easier for the main protagonists (and us) to disregard her blatant betrayal. Even Emma can’t break out of the stereotype; when she does something radical, such as having an affair, she looks no further than her husband’s best friend, and goes no further than a flat which she sets up as another home, with furnishings she chooses. She happily cooks his dinner for him or brings him picnics at their lunchtime trysts. It seems it is not her relationship but her imagination which is stunted.

The domestic drama has multiple shades and interpretations; the twisted chronology invests minor details with major importance. They are white, middle-class academics working in the world of art and literature – she runs a gallery; they are publishers – and, even though we don’t necessarily like them, we are interested in them. They are insular and yet somehow universal, which is a testament to all involved.

Friday Five: 1950s Drama

When I first heard I had got the part of Ann in Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, I thought I’d better do some research around the play. Albee wrote the one-act play The Zoo Story in 1958, centring on two men meeting on a bench in Central Park. Peter has gone there to read his book and he is accosted by Jerry, a transient who wants to talk.

Criticism of the play focussed on the fact that Peter wasn’t a fully fleshed-out character, so Albee wrote a first act, Homelife, in 2004. This act explored the domestic scene and Peter’s interaction with his wife, Ann, suggesting reasons for his behaviour during his later encounter with Jerry. Albee has not allowed The Zoo Story to be performed without Homelife (and vice versa) since.

The 1950s was a fascinating decade for drama. I discussed this with my mother (she’s great at literary debate and was frequenting London theatres at this time, so knows her stuff) and she pointed out that theatre in America was very different from theatre in Britain at this time. Britain was reacting to a Tory government, which always makes for interesting drama, as Churchill’s Conservative Party won the 1951 general election (with fewer votes but more seats than Labour) and Labour did not return to power until 1964.

Unemployment was steady, the system did not allow social improvement and many chose to fight against this system and bring attention to the working and middle classes. Within ten years, British theatre had shocked the establishment and moved a world away from the likes of Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. Before the 1960s kitchen sink dramas, the stages in the 1950s were full of social alienation, working class realism and a move towards Absurdism. Many of the playwrights of the 1950s were left-wing and angry. In 1950s theatre in context, StageWon, Dan Hutton explains, 

“The defining play of this era, however, and arguably the one which changed British drama forever, was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. It has gone down in theatre folklore as the piece which singlehandedly managed to pull British drama out of the innate Victorian traditionalism of the first part of the 1900s and into the 20th century. Charting a few days in the life of the now infamous Jimmy Porter, it was panned by many critics but spawned one of the most famous reviews of all time by Kenneth Tynan in the Observer, who said they he “could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger”.”

Whereas the anarchistic Angry Young Men (and Women – Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey is a classic of the era) were particularly British, some of these themes were also being developed in American dramas. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams may have been a little more structured, but Hutton argues it was clear that “a precedent had been set for plays from which meaning was difficult to extract”. Plays began to appear meaningless with lack of plot and action; the death of the narrative led to confused and bewildered characters, and probably audiences.

So, besides reading around Albee and the historical period against which these plays were set, I have been discovering and re-reading some great work of the era.

5 Quintessential 1950s playwrights: 

1. Arthur Miller – The Crucible (1953); A View from the Bridge (1955) – looping dialogue in which characters desperately try to explain things to each other and are rarely understood
2. Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot (1953); Endgame (1957); Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) - a massive step in the direction of the absurd
3. Tennessee Williams – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955); Orpheus Descending (1957) - terribly conficted characters doind desperately brutal emotional things to one another
4. Harold Pinter – The Dumb Waiter (1957); The Birthday Party (1958); The Caretaker (1959) - the plot disappars into dialogue and the theatre of menace is born
5. Eugène Ionesco – The Lesson; The Chairs; The New Tenant (1953) – one-act plays which he described as ‘anti-pièces’ or anti-plays; extended sketches of nonsense as words overwhelm the characters to create a sense of unease

Betrayal - Harold Pinter

Last night I went with Him Outdoors and my parents to Circa Theatre to see Betrayal. It was fabulous – all four of us thought so, which is a pretty good strike rate from a fairly diverse audience. My parents first saw this play about 30 years ago and were keen to see it again. Him Outdoors has never seen a play by Pinter and wondered what I meant when I said a play was ‘Pinteresque’. I think he has a pretty good idea now.

Betrayal is the story of an affair between Emma (Danielle Mason) and Jerry (Toby Leach). Emma is married to Robert (Jason Whyte), and Robert and Jerry are best friends. Yes, it’s an old story and the love triangle has been played out on stage in so many ways, but this feels fresh and memorable. The split level divided set works well and the sound and lighting add to the ambience without intruding, allowing the audience to concentrate purely on the three people in the ring.

It is a play about power and the distortion of assumptions, which is told in reverse. The effect is like finishing a book and going back immediately to re-read it to wonder, ‘would I have seen that coming?’ Founded on dramatic irony, there are times when we know that she knows that he knows, but he doesn’t know. If this sounds like it’s confusing, it could be. It pays to pay attention; to keep the upper hand.

Toby Leach is on crutches due to a pre-play incident which must have altered the staging of some scenes. It is tricky to indicate power when you are sitting on a sofa with your leg in plaster, but the play is one of verbal sparring rather than anything physical and many of the scenes are critical in their repressed motion – an arm flung across a sofa; a tightly belted coat; a briskly-snapped-shut book all speak volumes.

The revealing moments thick and fast, and the sympathy switches from wronged husband to aggrieved couple to man/woman desperately trapped in a loveless marriage and back again. This play was written in 1978, and there is a tendency of critics to ask, ‘Is Pinter still relevant?’ Hell, yes. Love; jealousy; repression; competition; excitement; self-affirmation; and, indeed, betrayal – aren’t these universal themes? Or are we all perfect now?

Jason Whyte is excellent as Robert; his fast-paced delivery with crystal clear enunciation is the perfect counterpoint to Leach’s more languorous posturing. Whyte plays his part with controlled menace and a smile that could give you nightmares. Danielle Mason could concentrate less on the accent and more on the assent. Her Emma is beautiful in a willowy way, but she radiates more constipated sterility than consummate sensuality.

The dialogue is almost frustratingly natural, giving the play its moments of humour. The circuitous communication conceived here gave birth to the conversations beloved of modern comedy (think Teachers; Green Wing; The Office; Alan Partridge). Apparently Harold Pinter hated actors (or other directors) messing with his script. Why would you when one of the definitive playwrights of modern theatre has laid it all out for you?

Unless they have been seduced by American popular psychology talk shows, real people don’t analyse their feelings in excruciating detail. You have to surmise what they mean from what they say and how they act, and that is exactly what we are given in Betrayal.

Is there an underlying current? Under close questioning from Emma, Jerry barks back, ‘I said exactly what I meant’. There is a lot of movement beneath these still waters, and, as a popular contemporary advert would have it, ‘If you’ve never learned to swim, you’re like a baby in the water.’ Will these characters drown or stay afloat? It all depends how well they have learned to negotiate the hidden rapids.

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