Review: Betrayal, Comedy Theatre

Count the ways that Jerry, Emma and Robert – Pinter’s mobius triangle of lovers – betray one another and you soon run out of fingers. Most plainly, there’s the basic premise of infidelity. A single affair entails two marital betrayals and another of friendship. In turn, each manifests itself a hundred times over, rippling into everyday deceptions and withheld information.

Emma and Jerry’s seven-year relationship is, famously, played backwards. We start with their hungover reunion and end on a drunken first kiss. In each scene we are equipped with information at the same time as the characters are stripped of it; disarmed by ignorance. Even within there’s a bartering for information and knowledge proves itself power: Robert is privy to his own betrayal long before Jerry ever realises. It’s a whisker away from an I-know-you-know-I-know situation. Most of all, though, Pinter allows the consequences of any betrayal to stain the act itself.

Ian Rickson’s production, however, is best in it’s handling of another sense of the concept: betrayal of the true self. By that, I don’t mean the selling out that Pinter ingeniously uses as a parallel, in which Robert and Jerry hollow out into middle-aged moneymen – publisher and literary agent respectively – treating literature not as art, but stock to be shifted. Instead, I mean the telltale signs, the give-aways and letting-slips; those moments in which pretence gets punctured. Here, the play’s future – already known to us – exists in the present moment. It pre-empts itself. Though not always an express concern of the text, this is integral to the success of Pinter’s play. (Perhaps even to naturalistic theatre as a whole.) Without the emergent subtext, the jangling guilt and suppressed secrets, betrayals might go unnoticed.

Rickson’s cast pepper their activity with fidgets and tics. Wedding rings are twisted, ankles clasped and wineglasses wobbled. In these actions, the stress of maintaining a constructed outward image reveals itself. The internal pressure under another’s gaze finds an alternative point of release that gives the lie away. You see it most clearly when they believe themselves unwatched. The moment Emma’s back turns, for example, Robert’s face drops into a cold stare of aggression. The smile doesn’t fade. It is whipped away like a magician’s tablecloth.

In these terms, Robert and Jerry’s dinner becomes climatic, because it teeters on the edge of cataclysm. Everything so nearly comes out. Robert, who has recently learned of the affair, bites his lip. Without showing his cards, he gives off a sense of a killer hand that Jerry picks up on, but can’t pin down. They match each other drink for drink. They eyes constantly interrogating. Ben Miles (Robert) and Douglas Henshall (Jerry) both give extraordinary performances. Each is so precise and in tune with the other that one truly believes their body language to be unconscious reaction. Beneath the table, their feet mirror one another. Not two stags locking horns, as one might expect of men battling over a woman, but rather two fencers in a stalemate, feinting and braced.

I was less enamoured of Kristin Scott-Thomas, who, for all her breezy ease and flow, lacks the fine-tuned physical nuance of her castmates. She is an expressive whole; they are sum totals. You sense Scott-Thomas, where you read Miles and Henshall. The result is that anything remotely deliberate or set-piecey feels contrived and stilted. Her clangers, like the clunks of the set, shatter conviction.

As for Rickson, he makes two curious decisions, both of costuming. Making Miles up into Pinter’s body-double – the thick sideburns, the waves of black hair, the leather jacket – is a red herring. Anyone that would recognise the resemblance would surely be aware of Betrayal’s underlying autobiography. (Pinter had his own seven-year affair with BBC presenter Joan Bakewell.) Only the husband is surely not the autobiographical role. That it’s not Jerry but Robert – admittedly, the part Pinter played for radio – could suggest the play to be self-flagellatory, as if Pinter was putting himself in another man’s shoes.

The second is to keep Henshall in the same blue shirt, brown jacket and chords for a whole decade. Scott-Thomas and Miles, by contrast, change costumes and hairstyles more often than Lady Gaga. Though tremendously heavy-handed, it speaks of the permanence of The Other Lover, for, where one sees first-hand the many faces of a life partner, the adulterer is only seen in a single situation: the clandestine meeting, isolated from the clutter of either party’s life and so, entirely out of time. The Other plays only the part of lover; the life-partner must multi-role.

Perhaps that explains why the tics disappear when Jerry and Emma are alone in the flat. Here, Emma and Jerry seem as easy and unguarded as when alone or unwatched, as if they can breath easy and be themselves. Johanna Town’s lighting instills the crisp air of a seaside getaway, not the muggy smog of Kilburn High Street. It seems to cleanse the blanched and blotchy wallpaper of its grubbiness. The flat, which permeates every other location (albeit, I suspect, more out of practicality than design), becomes as much a safe-house as The Dumb Waiter’s basement or The Caretaker’s attic.

There’s real intelligence herein and a willingness to trade in minutiae. Rickson has played psycho-sociologist, classifying the different betrayals as they stack up like a body count. There mightn’t be the hurtling inevitability of emotional implostion, but, at its best, Rickson’s staging must rank amongst the most insightful. It’s the sort of show to which you long you take a magnifying glass, if not an entire forensic team, so as to better scour for clues.