Betrayal
Opening Night: September 5, 2019
Closing: December 8, 2019
Theater: Bernard B. Jacobs
BETRAYAL is the story of an illicit affair that unfolds in reverse—from the end of a marriage to the first forbidden spark. Starring Golden Globe and Olivier Award winner Tom Hiddleston (The Avengers), Zawe Ashton (Velvet Buzzsaw) and Charlie Cox (Daredevil), this stunning production features the daring vision of one of the UK’s most acclaimed directors.
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September 5, 2019
It’s just six years since the last sizzling Broadway revival of this work, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall, all in top form. But this very fine production makes an absolutely compelling case for returning so quickly to the play, in which betrayals cut in every direction — between couples, friends and within the characters themselves. Lloyd and his actors illuminate a glimmering darkness in the drama, a deeper well of sorrows that linger in the air even after the cast take their bows.
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September 5, 2019
How can a naked space seem so full? Feelings furnish the stage in the resplendently spare new production of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” which opened on Thursday night at the Bernard Jacobs Theater, and they shimmer, bend and change color like light streaming through a prism. Directed by Jamie Lloyd — and acted with surgical precision by Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox — this stripped-down revival of Pinter’s 1978 tale of a sexual triangle places its central characters under microscopic scrutiny, with no place to hide. Especially not from one another, as everybody is on everybody else’s mind, all the time. They are also all almost always fully visible to the audience. This British version is the most merciless and empathic interpretation of this much performed work I’ve seen, and it keeps returning to my thoughts in piercing shards, like the remnants of a too-revealing dream. I had heard good things about this “Betrayal” when it debuted in London earlier this year, but I didn’t expect it to be one of those rare shows I seem destined to think about forever.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 5, 2019
But as a focused exploration of human duplicity, Betrayal is an unembellished marvel and this Broadway revival gives the 1978 play a smart, stripped down treatment. The cast, imported from last spring’s London production, includes Tom Hiddleston (Loki in the Marvel films and forthcoming Disney+ series), and Charlie Cox (the title role in Netflix’s Daredevil). Along with British actress Zawe Ashton (Velvet Buzzsaw), Hiddleston and Cox come with long theater resumes; they are both terrific sprung from their comic book trappings. Director Jamie Lloyd, a frequent Pinter interpreter, responds to the spare text with a staging to match: The set is framed in bare, graphite-colored walls, furnished with only an occasional chair and folding table. There are no costume changes, unless you count the retucking of a shirt. (The scenic and costume design is by Soutra Gilmour.) Virtually the only props are the bottles and glasses that keep our three principals in the drink. The lighting (by Jon Clark) is stark, throwing shadows of the three characters up on those empty walls and echoing their doubled lives.
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September 5, 2019
How can such a cool play make us sweat? Chalk it up to the incredible heat generated by the starry cast of Broadway’s latest “Betrayal,” featuring Tom Hiddleston and Zawe Ashton as a long-married couple and Charlie Cox as the secret lover. Director Jamie Lloyd’s impeccable direction — now on Broadway, after a hot-ticket London run — strips Pinter’s 1978 play to its bare bones: the excruciating examination of the slow death of a marriage. It’s a daring approach, leaving the characters nowhere to hide. Certainly not in the language, which is so famously spare that even the pauses pulse with unspoken emotion and hidden meaning. And definitely not in the staging, which is the essence of minimalism.
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September 5, 2019
Secret love shacks, or love flats as the case may be, notwithstanding, no affair is an island built for two – there’s always at least a third person in the mix, typically considered the betrayed. In Jamie Lloyd’s masterful revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal – one is tempted to call it a reinvention, so deeply and definitely urgent is his take – three of the ever-shifting betrayers and betrayees occupy the stage at all times, one or another bearing silent witness as the other two enact an affair’s all-too-familiar scenes of lies, transgressions, excitement and the love that, at least fleetingly, prompts it all.
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