Lantern Theater Company presents Harold Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’

Even the talented trio of Geneviève Perrier, Jered McLenigan, and Gregory Isaac manages only intermittently to thaw the frigid proceedings.

Leaving it all onstage

Pinter drew from his own life to create the play, which has remained popular since its premiere. (London revivals are practically an annual event — a new production starring Tom Hiddleston opens on the West End in March.) In 1962, he began an affair with the television host Joan Bakewell that stretched until 1969. Along the way, he learned that Bakewell’s husband at the time —who was also a close friend — knew about the relationship well before its conclusion.

The dramatization leaves no detail unpilfered. Emma (Perrier), a gallery curator, and Jerry (McLenigan), a literary agent, shag surreptitiously for seven years under the nose of Robert (Isaac), Emma’s husband and Jerry’s best friend. Robert reveals his knowledge of the dalliance in an early scene. The only tangible downstream effect? They haven’t played squash in years. (The sport gets namechecked so often as a byword for inscrutable male friendship that the Racquet Club of Philadelphia should be made an honorary production sponsor.)

Searching for meaning

Betrayal unfolds in reverse chronological order, which should keep the audience guessing as to who knows what at any given time. But Kathryn MacMillan’s production is marked by scant suspense. Rarely does any single moment feel truly spontaneous or fully inhabited, as too often the actors all but wink their knowing complicity. Lugubrious interstitial music (by Christopher Colucci) practically screams the subtext. An unnecessary intermission deflates any tension the playwright seeks to build.

When Emma and Jerry encounter each other in the first scene, two years after their breakup, they interact as though they were strangers. If this seemed a choice, it might be interesting as a coping mechanism, a suit of emotional armor. But a similar lack of history pervades the later scenes, which take place at their affair’s most fervent point — and it extends to the play’s other relationships as well. When Emma confesses her extramarital relationship to Robert on an Italian vacation, the moment remains devoid of its much-needed psychological dimension.

Perrier has a wonderfully expressive face and manages to find isolated moments of haunting complexity. Occasionally, though, her line readings tend to conflate flatness with nuanced insinuation. Isaac has one line reading he repeats throughout — calibrated, it seems, to communicate a maximal level of Oxbridge unflappability. Straining for comedy, McLenigan too often resembles the actor John Cleese in appearance and manner. No member of the trio manages to impregnate the legendary Pinter silences with even a dash of hidden meaning.

Why should we care?

Betrayal has transitioned from an in-the-moment exploration of adultery among the upper crust to a fairly staid period piece. It is inextricably tied to the social mores of the era in which it was created and to the British stereotypes of stiff-upper-lip repression and stifled passions. Pinter posits that Emma, Jerry, and Robert can only tap into their emotional cores through subterfuge and secrets — they must hurt each other to feel something, anything.

In that respect, the author espouses a view of humanity not dissimilar to those on display in earlier works like The Homecoming and The Birthday Party, albeit with a more attractive surface than those gritty, outwardly coarse plays. By the time he wrote Betrayal, Pinter had transitioned from enfant terrible of the Angry Young Men generation to wealthy, socially connected public intellectual, but his fundamental outlook never changed. The well-heeled façade — represented here by Meghan Jones’s handsome but overly general set and LeVonne Lindsay’s modish costumes — still conceals a terminal rot at the heart of society, personified by the bitter pas de trois at the center of the drama.

Lantern’s production puts a premium on shallow artifice, largely content to stay on the surface level. In a sense, that matches the play, which doesn’t probe as deeply as some of Pinter’s other works. But it also left me wondering why I should care about these pretty people and their petty problems.