Betrayal
Opening Night: October 27, 2013
Closing: January 5, 2014
Theater: Ethel Barrymore Theater
An extramarital affair between Emma and Jerry, who is the best friend of Emma’s husband Robert, is examined in backwards chronology.
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October 27, 2013
"Betrayal" has always been the least elusive — the least Pinteresque — of all Harold Pinter’s major power-plays. And this hot-ticket revival, directed by Mike Nichols and starring superlunary couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, may be the least Pinteresque "Betrayal" we will ever see.
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October 27, 2013
NEW YORK – In the Internet age of sexting scandals and tabloid humiliation, infidelity without public shaming seems almost quaint. So why is Harold Pinter’s 1978 play, Betrayal, still such a bristling drama? Its structural brilliance, for one thing, tracking an adulterous triangle in reverse chronology that stretches back nine years and uncovers as many mysteries as it solves. It also doesn’t hurt to have actors like Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall at the absolute top of their game. Likewise, director Mike Nichols, who coaxes his cast to mirror their characters, carefully parsing every word for hidden meaning. In a play largely about what’s unsaid, that makes for thrilling theater.
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October 27, 2013
NEW YORK — Despite the play’s reputation as an exquisite fusion of simmering menace and incontrovertible sexual desire, the haunting, richly textured Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s backward-traveling "Betrayal" has been infused with an aching ennui by the redoubtable Mike Nichols, a director who has lived long enough to have seen that even adultery grows old, and the aging adulterers sad and pathetic. Run an affair through the relentless wringer of time and it becomes as confining as a marriage.
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October 27, 2013
Mike Nichols and his cast get so much wrong in the Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978), let’s start with what goes right. It’s a handsome physical production, with large, well-appointed interiors by Ian MacNeil wafting in and out to composer James Murphy’s moody noodling and glowing with Brian MacDevitt’s evocative lighting. Daniel Craig shucks off his 007 persona to become Robert, a successful book publisher whose wife, Emma (Rachel Weisz) conducts a seven-year affair with Robert’s friend Jerry (Rafe Spall), a literary agent. The compact, rugged Craig hasn’t shrunken from years behind the camera: he projects himself fully and muscularly to the back stalls. Craig even enlivened vastly inferior material when last he was on the Great White Way, in the 2009 police melodrama A Steady Rain. And he’s not emoting in a vacuum: Weisz and Spall have charisma to spare, not to mention keen sexual chemistry for their Kilburn flat trysts. So the design is lovely, the cast is appealing and the play itself, while of its time, is not essentially dated. It’s simply that nobody gets the tone
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October 27, 2013
So just how sexy is it? Oh, admit it. That’s the biggest question on your mind. You didn’t pay all that money for tickets to “Betrayal” because it was written by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, the great master of existential dread and the vagaries of memory.
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