Betrayal ★★★★
Director Jamie Lloyd has given Harold Pinter’s just about perfect (and extremely autobiographical) Betrayal a just about perfect treatment—with actors Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Cox and Zawe Ashton giving just about perfect performances.
Betrayal, first seen in 1978, is the one where over the series of scenes time for the most part moves backwards. In it the extramarital affair between Robert (Hiddleston) and Emma (Ashton begins (at the last scene, of course) and then has long ended (the opening scene, of course). This, while Jerry, Emma’s husband and Robert’s best friend remains in the dark through most of the adulterous shenanigans. Or does he? And is he the only one betrayed, or are eventually all three?
This Betrayal around, Lloyd had Soutra Gilmour design an ultra-economical set consisting of three neutrally beige walls (the upstage wall moving back and forth to isolate the scenes) and a few chairs the actors shift accordingly. When one of them—dressed in streetwear they never change—isn’t in a scene, he or she hovers in the background, sometime ambling slowly along the upstage wall, sometimes remaining still. Always in view, they underline the persisting triangle.
Although Betrayal has always been a cool play, reflecting the well-known British preference for stiff upper lips, this revival is one of the coolest. For decades, much has been said about “The Pinter Pause.” He was famously known for indicating dialogue pauses—140 in Betrayal. Eventually, Pinter himself repudiated his insistence on them. When acting in his works, he declared he sometimes ignored the pauses.
Nevertheless, Lloyd, Hiddleston, Cox and Ashton seemingly abide by every one of the 140—and even extend them. The approach is successful. They’re convincingly impressive as three people behaving less than uprightly but pondering their harmful actions even as they carry on with them. One of the most important moments occurs in the final sequence when Emma makes up her mind whether to succumb to Robert’s entreaties. Using revolving runways, Lloyd finds a particularly striking way to show the decision being made.
A question for another time is how Pinter could write the play, knowing he was exposing well-known public figures to, well, betrayal.
Three Sisters ★★
The director Rebecca Frecknall is presenting Anton Chekhov’s classic drama as what she must consider a play for our time. She’s using a new translation by Cordelia Lynn, who writes in a program essay that people who hand out these assignments “think just because you’re a writer you know how to write things but actually you know fuck all.”
What Lynn clearly knows is that four- and seven-letter versions of the f-word are bandied about today by people who would never have used them (or even known them) during earlier periods, periods like the one in which Chekhov was writing.
Another way of saying this is that futzing around with Three Sisters in order to make it a play for the current moment dismisses entirely the greater reality that Chekhov’s script is a play for all time. It doesn’t need updating. Quite the opposite. The futzer, or futzers, are running the risk of producing a travesty.
Frecknall don’t go that far, but she comes dangerously close. She’s saved by any number of the cast members, who, when left alone to act, do penetrate to the play’s beating heart. In a work where the word “happy” is often repeated and the characters’ insisting that they are happy or hope to be happy or imagine a future in which those who come after them are happy is also often repeated, the actors wear the proper accompanying emotions on their faces and in their bodies.
Chief among them are those representing sisters Olga Sergeyevna (Patsy Ferran), Masha (Pearl Chanda) and Irina (Ria Zmitrowicz). They’re especially supported by Peter McDonald as Alexander Ignatevich Vershinin, the military man for whom Masha in pining; Elliot Levey as Fyodor Ilyich Kulygin, the husband for whom Masha isn’t pining; and Alan William as Ivan Romanovich Chebutykin, the aging 60-year-old doctor convinced that in the end nothing matters and that existence is an illusion.
Left to their own devices the above-mentioned and colleagues might have presented a truly acceptable Three Sisters, but the language Lynn came up with for them and, more importantly, Frecknall’s erasing any semblance of a home for the three sisters and brother Andre (Freddie Meredith) to inhabit is a caution.
Instead, all four acts are performed for the most part on a blank stage, usually furnished with only a few chairs. There’s such a shortage of furniture that when these wan sisters lie down, they do so on the floor. (Frecknall opens the show with a flashback to their father’s funeral a year to the day earlier than the first scene and has many chairs then.) For the fourth scene, which occurs outside, the sisters and some stagehands unfurl a carpet meant to represent dry ground.
At other times, Frecknall introduces frenzied dances and odd drill-like formations involving some of the many chairs adorning the opening scene. She includes any number of other gratuitous devises that have the effect of allowing her idea of a play for our time devolve into a play that only Chekhov’s indisputable genius saves from existing for no time.
Top Girls ★★★★
When in 1982 Caryl Churchill came up with Top Girls, she imagined a large number of characters but knew many theater companies where she hoped the play would be presented wouldn’t have the budgets. So, no fool she, she called for doubling and tripling.
Now 36 years on, she’s accumulated her glowing reputation, which means that for the National Theatre revival, there’s the wherewithal to fill each role with a different player, surely a fitting development for the #MeToo era.
Churchill places her top girls in three locations. There’s a fantasy lunch where historical women from different eras compare and contrast their experiences. There’s the Top Girls agency where temp jobs are the mission. There’s the busy kitchen where top Top Girls agency operator Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) and her estranged sister Joyce (Lucy Black) rehash resentments arising when ambitious Marlene left her daughter Angie (Liv Hill) for sister Joyce to raise.
In 2019, the lunch where Isabella Bird (Siobhán Redmond), Lady Nihõ (Wendy Kweh), Dull Gret (Ashley McGuire), Pope Joan (Amanda Lawrence) and Patient Grizelda (Lucy Ellinson) banter retains it amusing allure, especially as outfitted by costumer Merle Hensel. The Top Girls agency stands as a nice swipe at women judging other women where positions are concerned. Unfortunately, it’s dated. (Were Churchill writing now, she might imagine a headhunter agency where top women are being vetted for glass-ceiling-shattering executive positions.) Coming off with fiery aplomb is the Marlene-Joyce confrontation where, respectively, Kingsley and Black demonstrate what it can be when women aren’t feeling at all comfortably anywhere near the top.
Lyndsey Turner directed the production and is to be congratulated for making Churchill’s dream of 16 actors playing the 16 roles come true.
Betrayal opened March 14, 2019, at the Harold Pinter (London) and runs through June 8. Tickets and information: pinteratthepinter.com
Three Sisters opened April 16, 2019, at the Almeida (London) and runs through June 1. Tickets and information: almeida.co.uk
Top Girls opened April 3, 2019, at the National (London) and runs through July 20. Tickets and information: nationaltheatre.org.uk
