Of the many subtle, seemingly inconsequential but spectacular choices that director Jamie Lloyd and the creative team make in the Broadway-by-way-of-London production of Harold Pinter’s late-’70s love-triangle drama Betrayal, perhaps the best is a song that punctuates a couple of scene changes: “Enjoy the Silence,” by English electro-pop band Depeche Mode.
The haunting cover version, performed by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, is stripped down—like the rest of the revival—so all that remains is little more than the lyrics:
“All I ever wanted/ All I ever needed/ Is here—in my arms/ Words are very unnecessary/ They can only do harm.” And let’s not forget this adultery-appropriate verse: “Vows are spoken/ To be broken/ Feelings are intense/ Words are trivial/ Pleasures remain/ So does the pain.”
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★ review here.]
Lloyd’s entire production is as refreshingly spare and unadorned as Pinter’s pause-packed prose. (Never doubt the intent of those pauses. Peter Hall, who directed many of Pinter’s plays in their premieres, once said in an interview: “It’s not at all absurd for Harold to ring up and say, ‘Page 37—cut the pause.’”) Though the story spans nine years—starting two years after the end of an affair between Jerry (Charlie Cox) and Emma (Zawe Ashton), the wife of his best friend, Robert (Tom Hiddleston), and traveling back to the deceptive duo’s clandestine first kiss—the actors undergo no hairstyle or clothing changes. Throughout, the duplicitous Emma wears a flowing blouse and high-waisted jeans in complementary shades of blue—the color of trust and loyalty.
Similarly, while the action begins in a pub and shifts to both Jerry’s and Robert’s houses, a restaurant, the lovers’ flat, and—in the most pivotal scene—a hotel room in Venice, Italy—there is virtually no set to speak of, save a turntable that helps move the characters through time.
Though projections (“two years earlier,” and so on) help guide the audience, we see the finish-to-start progression most vividly in the performances: In the first scene, thanks to the charming Cox and the stylish, just-a-touch-flirty Ashton, it’s clear why Jerry and Emma sparked. “Ever think of me?” asks Emma, clearly wanting the answer to be yes. “I don’t need to think of you,” says Jerry. “Oh?” she replies. “I don’t need to think of you,” he says, a bit softly. Because of course you don’t need to think of someone who’s become a part of you. Then we watch the pair cycle back to incomprehensible sadness (their breakup) to blissful faux domesticity (Emma decorates their flat with a tablecloth she bought while in Venice… with Robert) to drunken possibility (how their affair, and probably many others, first began).
All the while, Robert is there. This is one of Lloyd’s possibly controversial but ultimately craftiest choices. At first, you will wonder about the logic: Even though he’s standing scarecrow-still on the back wall, won’t Avengers star (and Olivier Award winner) Hiddleston—whose remarkable Broadway debut is the cause for the stage-door pandemonium and scalper mania on West 45th Street—be a bit of a distraction? Actually, no. He simply fades into the background—as Ashton does when her Emma lingers near a Robert-Jerry scene, and as Cox does when his Jerry sits up against the wall during the only Emma and Robert scene (the play’s midpoint and its dramatic peak, being the moment when Robert discovers the betrayal). By keeping every actor onstage, constantly in each other’s orbits, Lloyd has captured the greatest—and most heartbreaking—truth about infidelity: The other person is always there.
Betrayal opened Sept. 5, 2019, and runs through Dec. 8 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre and runs through December 8. Tickets and information: betrayalonbroadway.com
