Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox, Eddie Arnold.
The act of infidelity is one that causes infinite pain, but also brings a state of war within the soul of the people affected, regardless of whether they are the instigator of the close-knit treachery or the one left behind, unknowing, blissful in their ignorance, loyal to the ideal that they have in their mind that their world is safe from such corruption.
Harold Pinter’s Betrayal sees beyond the unfaithful and reveals that infidelity is not the same of disloyalty, at least not in the minds of those who may end up on this road in which they see excitement, perhaps conquest, or even just a sense of power that comes with secrets hiding in plain sight. The question placed before the audience at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre is more aimed at who really is culpable in such circumstances, who is the one betrayed when the affair has been admitted to. Is it the one who seemingly takes delight in revealing that the secret wasn’t so clandestine after all, the injured party who takes up an air of pretence in which they ignore the failings of those around them, or is it the one we don’t meet, the one invisible to whom we ignore and who has the drama slide past them as if disloyalty is just another moment in the day in their lives?
The beauty of Pinter’s Betrayal has always been two-fold, one steeped in the author’s own life and conscious, the other is how uniquely the play unfolds, the resulting questions hanging on the edge of the precipice which slowly steps backwards as the audience is enlightened to how such a life altering exposure to lies, secrets and love can begin, long after it seems to end.
Betrayal is perhaps an unmasking, a ceremony of human ambition to own something that they have no right to conceal, the furtive glances, the stealth of planning, and in the end just who has the upper hand, a friendship that survives or a marriage built on sand. The ritual is forever it seems; and Pinter’s open frankness is one that captures just how human we are, how undeserving we become when we first set out deceive.
To capture Pinter takes honesty, and more than a little subterfuge as the jigsaw pieces slowly fall into place, and whilst you could not ask for more in the performances of the male leads, Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Cox, the subtle deception of Emma, framed so simply but with wonderful precision by Zawe Ashton, was of enormous insight, and one which truly bought the notion of betrayal to its ripe conclusion.
A production of intimacy and truth, directed with pin-point precision by Jamie Lloyd, Betrayal is a play which epitomises constancy and reliability between stage and stalls, an act of faith rewarded.
Ian D. Hall