Harold Pinter's 'Betrayal' on Broadway

For that reason, I find myself conflicted and rather miserable every time I leave the theater after seeing one of his plays. Such was the state in which I found myself, leaving Betrayal a few nights ago. I mean, what’s the point in watching a play with glamorous superstars like Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, if you’re not going to derive any pleasure from it?

Betrayal, written in 1978, has always been, for me, one of the most fearsome plays of Pinter’s menacing oeuvre. It’s a play in which every aspect of man’s capacity for cruelty is explored in excruciating detail. At the same time, I admire its unique structure. This pas de trois charts the relationship between a husband, his wife, and his best friend over a period of nine years, during which each one brutally betrays the others. The brilliance of the play’s nine-scene structure is that the story is told in reverse chronology, meaning that it begins in the present and works its way backward in time. You know the outcome at the start, so the pain of it only increases with each scene.

It’s positively sadistic on the part of Pinter to put us through the experience — and masochistic for us to tolerate it, for that matter.

Who did what when

The play opens with a scene in a London pub. Jerry and Emma are breaking up, after a nine-year extramarital love affair. We learn that Emma is the wife of Robert, Jerry’s best friend and colleague (Jerry’s a literary agent, Robert’s a publisher). We also learn that Emma and her husband Robert are breaking up, too — and that Emma has just told Robert of her long-term affair with his best friend, Jerry.

You get the picture? The play then becomes about “who knew what and when.” Jerry, horrified that Emma has told his best friend of his betrayal, runs to Robert to find out his reaction. To his dismay, he finds that Emma has betrayed him, and that she actually told Robert four years earlier of their ongoing affair. So Jerry discovers while he’s been deceiving his best friend by bedding his wife, Robert’s known all along. Moreover, Robert has deceived Jerry by knowing and not letting Jerry know that he knows. (Is this getting hard to follow? That’s the brilliance — and perversity — of Pinter’s plot).

As the play goes back in time, more betrayals are revealed. Emma reveals to Jerry (her lover) that she’s pregnant by Robert. When Jerry gets upset, she defends herself, saying that, after all: “He’s my husband!” (That gets a laugh, as do other absurdities in the play.) More devastating betrayals are revealed, one after another (it turns out Robert has been unfaithful to Emma all along, too, while Jerry has been manipulating Robert), until finally we’re back at the beginning, when this cruel chess game began. It’s like the myth of Sisyphus, wherein you relive the agony all over again.

All the perfumes of Arabia can’t sweeten this author’s hand, to paraphrase Lady Macbeth. Despite the assemblage of an A+ artistic team, the play is chilling in its bleak view of human motivation. Sure, Daniel Craig (a.k.a. 007) is a splendid actor, as exciting on the stage as he is on screen. With his leonine mane and “lean and hungry look,” his Robert is an ideal predator who systematically punishes his unfaithful wife and friend. The beautiful Rachel Weisz (Craig’s real-life wife) plumbs the opacity and complexity of Emma, as she alternately uses and is used by the men. Rafe Spall, as Jerry, is an ideal comedic foil for the unhappy couple.

These admirable actors try their valiant best to make their characters compelling. But in the end, I find murderous villains like Iago (Othello) and Edmund (King Lear) more interesting than these cruel characters who are manipulative, dishonest, and hurtful for no apparent reason other than boredom, or sport, or their own emptiness.

Played for laughs

The estimable Mike Nichols — who has directed numerous works about infidelity (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Heartburn, among others) — tries to milk Betrayal for as many laughs as he can get. But those moments are superficial, like Band-Aids on a deep wound. The skilled designer Ian McNeill tries to distract you with his complex set, but you end up spending too much time watching walls and platforms floating in and out between the scenes, so again the pain is prolonged.

To be fair to Pinter, is there anything to be learned from Betrayal? What is he trying to say about marital infidelity? Apparently (at least from this production), it’s not as much about sex as it is about power and competition (between men); ownership and control (men over women); rebellion and revenge (women toward men) — and perverse pleasure on the part of all in getting even with each other for basic feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, humiliation, frustration, and disappointment.

But wait — if the play is about relationships, you might ask, where is the element of love? Was there ever any between these three? Beats me.

“The plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies”, Arthur Miller wrote. “In them, and in them alone, lies the belief — optimistic, if you will — in the perfectibility of man.” If you believe in the ultimate perversity (rather than perfectibility) of man, as Pinter apparently does, then what does that leave you with, at the end of the evening?

Pinter’s plays aren’t tragedies — they’re travesties of human behavior, in which the playwright seems to be saying: If you think this is bad, wait till the next scene. What is the lesson in that?

“Come on,” you might say, “Pinter is for grown-ups!” If so, then I’d rather see Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in Mary Poppins.