Betrayal - member and critics reviews.
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CockHargreaves
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Germangirl
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Yes, there is some truth in that, but - as you say - it was a good review and may I say, that the good ones, also the good ones regarding Daniel are far in the maority.
was the most pleasant surprise, almost, but not quite upstaging the other two.
was the most pleasant surprise, almost, but not quite upstaging the other two.
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..
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Sylvia's girl
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“BETRAYAL” on Broadway
New Yorkers and tourists alike are queuing up to see James Bond—I mean, Daniel Craig—on Broadway. The star-studded revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” is a theatergoer’s (and producer’s) dream on paper. Take one accessible, oft-produced play by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Give the reins to celebrated veteran director Mike Nichols. Cast British stage and film actors with serious chops, (it’s especially juicy for audiences to see real-life couple Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig onstage together). Even a cynical theatergoer would want to see what kind of production comes out of this well-constructed theatrical recipe.
Craig and Weisz play Robert and Emma, a married couple who have agreed to separate at the top of the play. Emma has learned that Robert had affairs throughout their relationship and in the first scene of the play, she meets with Jerry, Robert’s best man and her former lover of seven years, played by Rafe Spall. As the play travels backwards chronologically, we witness moments of passion, deceit, friendship and drunken honesty. Pinter’s menacing humor is in full stride in “Betrayal” and this production uses the humor—the quintessentially British subterfuge and stiff upper lippedness—broadly.
Craig’s Robert is charming, dark and slyly manipulative. A squash playing Oxbridge publisher who admits to disliking books, he wears a sweater coat well and drinks like a fish. He’s absolutely magnetic onstage. Weisz’s Emma is a shadowy wet blanket. Cold and matter of fact in the first scene, she hardly seems to be capable of the passion that brought her and Jerry together. And throughout the play she continues to be an absent presence onstage. Spall’s Jerry is funny, he’s bumbling, he’s not quite someone you imagine could have an affair for seven years without it taking a toll on his outside life. In the first scene, we see the toll that this affair has taken on him, as he prods her for information on what her husband has learned about their affair and mocks her for her newest affair with an author that he and Robert both know well. In the second scene, Jerry confronts Robert who tells him that he’s known about their affair for years.
By traveling backwards chronologically, we, as the audience, see the ways in which the characters’ decisions affect one another. Sometimes this is tragic and poignant, but most of the time it’s barely realized. It’s bubbling tension that never quite erupts.
Unfortunately, Nichols’ production of “Betrayal” suffers from overproduction. Gorgeous naturalistic sets glide slowly across the stage during scene changes while flies slowly ascend and descend. Projections depict gondolas in Venice and rowhouses in North London while helpfully telling us what year we’re travelling to. But Pinter’s play does not need pranic breathing between scenes. Rather than allowing the audience to ruminate on what they’ve seen, these gaps in action distract and bore us. Which is a shame, because Pinter’s story of complicated deceit should be anything but boring.
THEATRE REVIEW by Kate Mulley
http://vivalifestyles.net/2013/10/betrayal/
New Yorkers and tourists alike are queuing up to see James Bond—I mean, Daniel Craig—on Broadway. The star-studded revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” is a theatergoer’s (and producer’s) dream on paper. Take one accessible, oft-produced play by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Give the reins to celebrated veteran director Mike Nichols. Cast British stage and film actors with serious chops, (it’s especially juicy for audiences to see real-life couple Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig onstage together). Even a cynical theatergoer would want to see what kind of production comes out of this well-constructed theatrical recipe.
Craig and Weisz play Robert and Emma, a married couple who have agreed to separate at the top of the play. Emma has learned that Robert had affairs throughout their relationship and in the first scene of the play, she meets with Jerry, Robert’s best man and her former lover of seven years, played by Rafe Spall. As the play travels backwards chronologically, we witness moments of passion, deceit, friendship and drunken honesty. Pinter’s menacing humor is in full stride in “Betrayal” and this production uses the humor—the quintessentially British subterfuge and stiff upper lippedness—broadly.
Craig’s Robert is charming, dark and slyly manipulative. A squash playing Oxbridge publisher who admits to disliking books, he wears a sweater coat well and drinks like a fish. He’s absolutely magnetic onstage. Weisz’s Emma is a shadowy wet blanket. Cold and matter of fact in the first scene, she hardly seems to be capable of the passion that brought her and Jerry together. And throughout the play she continues to be an absent presence onstage. Spall’s Jerry is funny, he’s bumbling, he’s not quite someone you imagine could have an affair for seven years without it taking a toll on his outside life. In the first scene, we see the toll that this affair has taken on him, as he prods her for information on what her husband has learned about their affair and mocks her for her newest affair with an author that he and Robert both know well. In the second scene, Jerry confronts Robert who tells him that he’s known about their affair for years.
By traveling backwards chronologically, we, as the audience, see the ways in which the characters’ decisions affect one another. Sometimes this is tragic and poignant, but most of the time it’s barely realized. It’s bubbling tension that never quite erupts.
Unfortunately, Nichols’ production of “Betrayal” suffers from overproduction. Gorgeous naturalistic sets glide slowly across the stage during scene changes while flies slowly ascend and descend. Projections depict gondolas in Venice and rowhouses in North London while helpfully telling us what year we’re travelling to. But Pinter’s play does not need pranic breathing between scenes. Rather than allowing the audience to ruminate on what they’ve seen, these gaps in action distract and bore us. Which is a shame, because Pinter’s story of complicated deceit should be anything but boring.
THEATRE REVIEW by Kate Mulley
http://vivalifestyles.net/2013/10/betrayal/
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Sylvia's girl
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Germangirl
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Craig’s Robert is charming, dark and slyly manipulative. A squash playing Oxbridge publisher who admits to disliking books, he wears a sweater coat well and drinks like a fish. He’s absolutely magnetic onstage
Yes, this is what matters, BUT - by now - I have read too many different reviews of loving Daniel, of loving Rachel, of loving Rafe, that it seems not convincing to me, that she is as unpresent, as this reviewer states it. By now - frankly, I believe, I will be fine with a review, that thinks, they all are great, because I believe this is what Daniel woud like to read. All equally great, no one lesser then the other. As much as I am on HIS side, by now, I hope for reviews, that claim exactly that.
Sure, I do hope,. he plays off his charisma, his presense to his advantage...no doubt about THAT.
Also, IF you have different settings, its rather on the telling id the reviewer gets bored by the change. Seen too many quick changing movies? Instead, you could choose to sit back and think about what you have just seen. Boredom - IMO comes out of a bored mind. Not the fault of the production.
Yes, this is what matters, BUT - by now - I have read too many different reviews of loving Daniel, of loving Rachel, of loving Rafe, that it seems not convincing to me, that she is as unpresent, as this reviewer states it. By now - frankly, I believe, I will be fine with a review, that thinks, they all are great, because I believe this is what Daniel woud like to read. All equally great, no one lesser then the other. As much as I am on HIS side, by now, I hope for reviews, that claim exactly that.
Sure, I do hope,. he plays off his charisma, his presense to his advantage...no doubt about THAT.
Also, IF you have different settings, its rather on the telling id the reviewer gets bored by the change. Seen too many quick changing movies? Instead, you could choose to sit back and think about what you have just seen. Boredom - IMO comes out of a bored mind. Not the fault of the production.
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..
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Sylvia's girl
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SPOILERS
'I Don't Think We Don't Love Each Other': Betrayal on Broadway, 2013
The new revival of Harold Pinter's great late play Betrayal (1978), currently in previews at the Ethel Barrymore theater in New York, has received much attention and sold many tickets already because of its cast and director: Daniel Craig, a fine stage actor better known to audiences as the current James Bond on film; his real-life wife Rachel Weisz, also better known for her work in movies than onstage; Rafe Spall, making his Broadway debut after earning a name for himself in London's West End and on film; and, directing, Mike Nichols. Craig and Weisz are Pinter's married couple, Robert and Emma, and Spall plays Jerry, Robert's best friend -- and Emma's lover for seven years.
Betrayal begins in 1977 and mostly goes backward for a decade, apart from some forward motion through the critical year 1973. If you section Betrayal into scenes and place them in chronological order from 1968 to 1977, it's still an excellent play -- but to begin after the end of an affair and then watch it reversing through stages of tiring, frustration, regret, passion, anticipation, seduction, and realization is how it is intended. This makes us pay attention to what causes things, to the ways people change, and forget. Emma and Jerry married in 1963, and have two children. Jerry and his wife Judith -- never onstage -- have two children also. The children are spoken of, but, like Judith, never appear. Betrayal is about Robert and Jerry, and Emma as the woman who's less the object of their affection than the catalyst, and complicator, for the deep bonds between them.
Betrayal is about dishonesty and power, coldness and apathy, but also integrally art and profit. Robert is a publisher who hates books, or "to be more precise, prose. Or to be even more precise, modern prose." Jerry is a literary agent whose principal find seems to be Casey, or Spinks, a bad writer who writes popular autobiographical fiction about the portion of his life that's just ended (badly). Both he and Robert are living off Casey's non-art by the end -- or, rather, the beginning -- of the play, just as Emma is living off the artists of her gallery, about whose painting you don't hear, and whose work you never see. Perhaps it's worth noting that Judith, Jerry's unseen wife, is a doctor, an admirable profession to be sure, but couched in this play so as to sound as if she is making her living off damaged people. Jerry and Robert have known each other since their college days, when both were editing poetry journals at Oxford and Cambridge; one never knows who went where. The schools are fungible, the poetry is fungible, children and families are fungible -- very much in Betrayal is fungible.
I'd like to say that the central action of this play is the adultery between Emma and Jerry, but it really isn't. Pinter is hard on actors: It's dangerous to try to play him with passion, or at least any passions other than fear, or cruelty. The affair between Emma and Jerry is more depressing than sympathetic or titillating; Robert's reaction is to it sometimes angry, sometimes formal, but always essentially cold and detached -- the affair is his way to control both his wife and the man Robert admits, in the last line of the play, is his oldest friend and best man.
This plot doesn't sound like a laugh riot. However, Betrayal -- like all Pinter -- surprises you my making you laugh when you least expect to, and don't want to. Mike Nichols has been good for decades at extracting laughter from bleakness, and on this front he is the ideal Pinter director. That the audience packing every seat in the little red-and-gold Barrymore theater last Saturday night giggled and guffawed was a pleasant surprise. Sometimes the laughs were unrelated to the text, most memorably at the very end of the play. Throughout, Spall mugs a lot as Jerry, with rolls of the eyes when Robert mentions his wife. But one did indeed have to laugh when Jerry, in the last scene, is belaboring Emma with waste-land, modern-literature words of clichéd love, and asks her, "Have you ever been to the Sahara Desert?" Weisz's fans from her days in the Mummy movies just couldn't help themselves, and the theater rang with laughter at a most unPinterly place.
Not so humorous, alas, is the speed of the production. Betrayal is being performed without an intermission, and begins far too soon to gallop toward its conclusion. After the first scene, between Weisz and Spall, which was paced beautifully, I wanted everything to slow down. It's Pinter, for heaven's sake. The PAUSE is all. Pause, oh please, pause, I kept saying to myself. Slow down, stop, let those pauses marinate and suffocate and intensify. The director has removed, or abbreviated, almost all of them. Betrayal on Broadway comes too quickly. All three actors, at points, hurried through their lines. You shouldn't do that in Pinter, and especially in Scene Five of Betrayal. The scene begins gorgeously, in Venice, with the dome of San Marco and gondolas bobbing on the scrim above Emma and Robert's huge, ornate hotel bed. Here, in 1973, a letter from Jerry to Emma leads Robert to find out about their affair. He torments the truth out of his wife, slowly, with "pause" and "silence" written repeatedly into Pinter's stage directions. Daniel Craig is just angry, and occasionally wittily snide, but he races through his lines -- as he does again in Scene Seven, Robert's best scene by far. When he drops the mad energy at the end, it's a breathtaking difference. Here's Robert, cold controlling bastard Robert, remembering reading W. B. Yeats: "I was happy, such a rare thing, not in Venice, I don't mean that. I mean on Torcello, where I walked about Torcello in the early morning, alone, I was happy, I wanted to stay there forever." When Craig's Robert is icy and in the know, and viciously gradual, he is excellent. At such moments, where one feels he's setting his own pace, the play slows down and thinks and gleams. If Betrayal on Broadway gave Craig more latitude to truly be the character Pinter wrote, and consequently took half an hour longer, it would be a stone-cold smash.
From the start, the sets and costumes are perfect for the times: Eames chairs, blond Scandinavian wood everywhere, open-necked shirts in atrocious prints, peasant skirts, blocky espadrilles for the lady and flatter ones for the men. Craig particularly carries off the clothes with a highly entertained flair. He also uses the props scattered about, from the ubiquitous bottles of booze to, at one point, a child's stuffed toy with the most knowledge. When in Scene Four Robert flips that stuffed animal at Jerry, it makes him seem for a moment to be the only one of the adults who cares at all about any of their children -- just through the perfect timing of the gesture. The flat Jerry and Emma share on infrequent afternoons as "Mr. and Mrs. Green" is decorated with fine attention: two sets of mismatched his-and-hers dishes; fresh flowers that give way to a plant that eventually dies; postcards of Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats and James Joyce taped to the cupboards in the kitchen, fading in the sun like Emma's Venetian tablecloth as time wears out.
Weisz is almost too beautiful, too sympathetic, for Emma, a character who is more a pawn -- a squash ball being hit, if you will, between the men -- than the object of overwhelming attraction to either of them. Often, her lines are questions; and Emma routinely answers questions with questions: "Are you?" "No, really?" "Ever think of me?" Weisz turns these perfectly, never sounding whining -- or as if she cares about the answers to come. When, in Scene Five, she confesses her adultery to her husband, she covers her sexy white silk nightgown with a robe, gracefully detailing her embarrassment at being revealed in front of him.
Spall, likewise, is too likeable for the shallow and repellent Jerry, the man who's shagging his best friend's wife. However, he's doing so less because he loves Emma than because of his competitive, complementary relationship with Robert. When in the last scene the three characters sprawl drunkenly on a (Modernist, inevitably) divan, and Jerry, giggling, fake-humps Robert from behind, it's a ridiculously reductive moment putting Robert and Jerry both into supremely dumbed-down terms. It's a crude way to suggest the intensity of the largely unarticulated bond between the two men, and, also, Jerry's presumption here that he's not only "got the better of Robert" -- by the promise of now being able to "blacken" Emma -- but his childish pleasure at thinking he's done so.
This scene should be better all around, but it's not the fault of the actors. Here's Pinter's clear stage direction for Robert's entrance, as Jerry and Emma are together in a room one night in 1968:
He kisses her.
She breaks away.
He kisses her.
Laughter off.
She breaks away.
Door opens. ROBERT.
In this production of Betrayal, Emma and Jerry are kissing passionately as Robert walks in. What an easy, gimme aha! moment is thereby created: Robert knows about the attraction between them all along, and is immediately ready to sanction their affair, without question. Similarly, at the very end, here's Pinter:
Emma moves towards the door. Jerry grasps her arm. She stops still.
They stand still, looking at each other.
Instead, Jerry grapples with Emma, and as the theater goes dark they're snogging again. This moment -- like their brief bit of sex, almost fully clothed, in an earlier scene -- can't engender a passion where there simply isn't any.
Much about the new production is triumphant: the excellent casting and acting; the spot-on sets; the small evocative musical interludes between the scenes; the extraction and showcasing of Pinter's humor. The changes and omissions that jarred me -- the eradication of pauses and consequently swiftened dialogue; Robert as an angry, not-so-young man; interjections of explicit sex into a depressingly unsexy play -- make for a brighter and faster-moving evening in the theater, I admit. When you have the chance to see Pinter performed by first-rate actors, always go. The emphasis on lines and the small gestures makes all the difference. You want to cheer when, in the first scene, Weisz sneaks a sip of Spall's beer while he's gone to get her another glass of wine; when Spall refuses to pronounce "melone" or "limone" in an Italian accent; when Craig holds a too-rare pause, militantly, and then gracefully, bitingly silences his wife with, "Tell me, are you looking forward to our trip to Torcello?"
©Anne Margaret Daniel 2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-marg ... 33826.html
'I Don't Think We Don't Love Each Other': Betrayal on Broadway, 2013
The new revival of Harold Pinter's great late play Betrayal (1978), currently in previews at the Ethel Barrymore theater in New York, has received much attention and sold many tickets already because of its cast and director: Daniel Craig, a fine stage actor better known to audiences as the current James Bond on film; his real-life wife Rachel Weisz, also better known for her work in movies than onstage; Rafe Spall, making his Broadway debut after earning a name for himself in London's West End and on film; and, directing, Mike Nichols. Craig and Weisz are Pinter's married couple, Robert and Emma, and Spall plays Jerry, Robert's best friend -- and Emma's lover for seven years.
Betrayal begins in 1977 and mostly goes backward for a decade, apart from some forward motion through the critical year 1973. If you section Betrayal into scenes and place them in chronological order from 1968 to 1977, it's still an excellent play -- but to begin after the end of an affair and then watch it reversing through stages of tiring, frustration, regret, passion, anticipation, seduction, and realization is how it is intended. This makes us pay attention to what causes things, to the ways people change, and forget. Emma and Jerry married in 1963, and have two children. Jerry and his wife Judith -- never onstage -- have two children also. The children are spoken of, but, like Judith, never appear. Betrayal is about Robert and Jerry, and Emma as the woman who's less the object of their affection than the catalyst, and complicator, for the deep bonds between them.
Betrayal is about dishonesty and power, coldness and apathy, but also integrally art and profit. Robert is a publisher who hates books, or "to be more precise, prose. Or to be even more precise, modern prose." Jerry is a literary agent whose principal find seems to be Casey, or Spinks, a bad writer who writes popular autobiographical fiction about the portion of his life that's just ended (badly). Both he and Robert are living off Casey's non-art by the end -- or, rather, the beginning -- of the play, just as Emma is living off the artists of her gallery, about whose painting you don't hear, and whose work you never see. Perhaps it's worth noting that Judith, Jerry's unseen wife, is a doctor, an admirable profession to be sure, but couched in this play so as to sound as if she is making her living off damaged people. Jerry and Robert have known each other since their college days, when both were editing poetry journals at Oxford and Cambridge; one never knows who went where. The schools are fungible, the poetry is fungible, children and families are fungible -- very much in Betrayal is fungible.
I'd like to say that the central action of this play is the adultery between Emma and Jerry, but it really isn't. Pinter is hard on actors: It's dangerous to try to play him with passion, or at least any passions other than fear, or cruelty. The affair between Emma and Jerry is more depressing than sympathetic or titillating; Robert's reaction is to it sometimes angry, sometimes formal, but always essentially cold and detached -- the affair is his way to control both his wife and the man Robert admits, in the last line of the play, is his oldest friend and best man.
This plot doesn't sound like a laugh riot. However, Betrayal -- like all Pinter -- surprises you my making you laugh when you least expect to, and don't want to. Mike Nichols has been good for decades at extracting laughter from bleakness, and on this front he is the ideal Pinter director. That the audience packing every seat in the little red-and-gold Barrymore theater last Saturday night giggled and guffawed was a pleasant surprise. Sometimes the laughs were unrelated to the text, most memorably at the very end of the play. Throughout, Spall mugs a lot as Jerry, with rolls of the eyes when Robert mentions his wife. But one did indeed have to laugh when Jerry, in the last scene, is belaboring Emma with waste-land, modern-literature words of clichéd love, and asks her, "Have you ever been to the Sahara Desert?" Weisz's fans from her days in the Mummy movies just couldn't help themselves, and the theater rang with laughter at a most unPinterly place.
Not so humorous, alas, is the speed of the production. Betrayal is being performed without an intermission, and begins far too soon to gallop toward its conclusion. After the first scene, between Weisz and Spall, which was paced beautifully, I wanted everything to slow down. It's Pinter, for heaven's sake. The PAUSE is all. Pause, oh please, pause, I kept saying to myself. Slow down, stop, let those pauses marinate and suffocate and intensify. The director has removed, or abbreviated, almost all of them. Betrayal on Broadway comes too quickly. All three actors, at points, hurried through their lines. You shouldn't do that in Pinter, and especially in Scene Five of Betrayal. The scene begins gorgeously, in Venice, with the dome of San Marco and gondolas bobbing on the scrim above Emma and Robert's huge, ornate hotel bed. Here, in 1973, a letter from Jerry to Emma leads Robert to find out about their affair. He torments the truth out of his wife, slowly, with "pause" and "silence" written repeatedly into Pinter's stage directions. Daniel Craig is just angry, and occasionally wittily snide, but he races through his lines -- as he does again in Scene Seven, Robert's best scene by far. When he drops the mad energy at the end, it's a breathtaking difference. Here's Robert, cold controlling bastard Robert, remembering reading W. B. Yeats: "I was happy, such a rare thing, not in Venice, I don't mean that. I mean on Torcello, where I walked about Torcello in the early morning, alone, I was happy, I wanted to stay there forever." When Craig's Robert is icy and in the know, and viciously gradual, he is excellent. At such moments, where one feels he's setting his own pace, the play slows down and thinks and gleams. If Betrayal on Broadway gave Craig more latitude to truly be the character Pinter wrote, and consequently took half an hour longer, it would be a stone-cold smash.
From the start, the sets and costumes are perfect for the times: Eames chairs, blond Scandinavian wood everywhere, open-necked shirts in atrocious prints, peasant skirts, blocky espadrilles for the lady and flatter ones for the men. Craig particularly carries off the clothes with a highly entertained flair. He also uses the props scattered about, from the ubiquitous bottles of booze to, at one point, a child's stuffed toy with the most knowledge. When in Scene Four Robert flips that stuffed animal at Jerry, it makes him seem for a moment to be the only one of the adults who cares at all about any of their children -- just through the perfect timing of the gesture. The flat Jerry and Emma share on infrequent afternoons as "Mr. and Mrs. Green" is decorated with fine attention: two sets of mismatched his-and-hers dishes; fresh flowers that give way to a plant that eventually dies; postcards of Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats and James Joyce taped to the cupboards in the kitchen, fading in the sun like Emma's Venetian tablecloth as time wears out.
Weisz is almost too beautiful, too sympathetic, for Emma, a character who is more a pawn -- a squash ball being hit, if you will, between the men -- than the object of overwhelming attraction to either of them. Often, her lines are questions; and Emma routinely answers questions with questions: "Are you?" "No, really?" "Ever think of me?" Weisz turns these perfectly, never sounding whining -- or as if she cares about the answers to come. When, in Scene Five, she confesses her adultery to her husband, she covers her sexy white silk nightgown with a robe, gracefully detailing her embarrassment at being revealed in front of him.
Spall, likewise, is too likeable for the shallow and repellent Jerry, the man who's shagging his best friend's wife. However, he's doing so less because he loves Emma than because of his competitive, complementary relationship with Robert. When in the last scene the three characters sprawl drunkenly on a (Modernist, inevitably) divan, and Jerry, giggling, fake-humps Robert from behind, it's a ridiculously reductive moment putting Robert and Jerry both into supremely dumbed-down terms. It's a crude way to suggest the intensity of the largely unarticulated bond between the two men, and, also, Jerry's presumption here that he's not only "got the better of Robert" -- by the promise of now being able to "blacken" Emma -- but his childish pleasure at thinking he's done so.
This scene should be better all around, but it's not the fault of the actors. Here's Pinter's clear stage direction for Robert's entrance, as Jerry and Emma are together in a room one night in 1968:
He kisses her.
She breaks away.
He kisses her.
Laughter off.
She breaks away.
Door opens. ROBERT.
In this production of Betrayal, Emma and Jerry are kissing passionately as Robert walks in. What an easy, gimme aha! moment is thereby created: Robert knows about the attraction between them all along, and is immediately ready to sanction their affair, without question. Similarly, at the very end, here's Pinter:
Emma moves towards the door. Jerry grasps her arm. She stops still.
They stand still, looking at each other.
Instead, Jerry grapples with Emma, and as the theater goes dark they're snogging again. This moment -- like their brief bit of sex, almost fully clothed, in an earlier scene -- can't engender a passion where there simply isn't any.
Much about the new production is triumphant: the excellent casting and acting; the spot-on sets; the small evocative musical interludes between the scenes; the extraction and showcasing of Pinter's humor. The changes and omissions that jarred me -- the eradication of pauses and consequently swiftened dialogue; Robert as an angry, not-so-young man; interjections of explicit sex into a depressingly unsexy play -- make for a brighter and faster-moving evening in the theater, I admit. When you have the chance to see Pinter performed by first-rate actors, always go. The emphasis on lines and the small gestures makes all the difference. You want to cheer when, in the first scene, Weisz sneaks a sip of Spall's beer while he's gone to get her another glass of wine; when Spall refuses to pronounce "melone" or "limone" in an Italian accent; when Craig holds a too-rare pause, militantly, and then gracefully, bitingly silences his wife with, "Tell me, are you looking forward to our trip to Torcello?"
©Anne Margaret Daniel 2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-marg ... 33826.html
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Sylvia's girl
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Haha....It would seem so...it must be the vampire in me!cassandra wrote:Thanks for posting this SG, it was an interesting read. Have you become nocturnal?
Tbh, I am a poor sleeper, rarely sleeping through the night at the best of times. I go through phases and at the moment I am particularly bad which can be a pain but also gives me the chance to post anything I think that's worth posting.
I've also been waiting for this review, she tweeted yesterday that she was in the middle of writing it.
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Sylvia's girl
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http://ngpopgun.wordpress.com/category/theater/
From one of the Broadway forums..
Very good show Review by: , Oct 18, 2013
A wonderfully acted production of Harold Pinter's work Betrayal. While everyone wants to see Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in the show, it is Rafe Spall who steals the show. He is absolutely superb. The show flew by in 90 minutes. Now for the important question. Is it worth spending all your money for a premium ticket or on a resale site? I wouldn't spend too much over the ticket price. It was a very good show, but certainly doesn't justify some of the prices.It is heartening to see Craig back on Broadway after the stunning work he did in A Steady Rain. And now Ms. Weisz has braved the great way.
From one of the Broadway forums..
Very good show Review by: , Oct 18, 2013
A wonderfully acted production of Harold Pinter's work Betrayal. While everyone wants to see Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in the show, it is Rafe Spall who steals the show. He is absolutely superb. The show flew by in 90 minutes. Now for the important question. Is it worth spending all your money for a premium ticket or on a resale site? I wouldn't spend too much over the ticket price. It was a very good show, but certainly doesn't justify some of the prices.It is heartening to see Craig back on Broadway after the stunning work he did in A Steady Rain. And now Ms. Weisz has braved the great way.
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CockHargreaves
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I found the Anna Margaret Daniel article fascinating. She clearly knows the play well.
It's very interesting that the things she finds fault with are down to direction, not the actors. She seems very impressed with DC.
It's also interesting that she seems to think Emma should be a bit of a cold fish - other reviews have criticised Rachel for portraying her in that way.
It's very interesting that the things she finds fault with are down to direction, not the actors. She seems very impressed with DC.
It's also interesting that she seems to think Emma should be a bit of a cold fish - other reviews have criticised Rachel for portraying her in that way.
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Germangirl
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- Location: Germany
Thanks SG for all the reviews. So many different views on it and all seem to have a certain credibility. I think, this will be the tone of the final reviews - a bit of everything, because everybody seems to want something different out of it.
So she wants more pauses. Maybe she is right, but I remember Daniel saying, "If they don't make sense, don't do them" Probably others would find it dragging were it any longer. Here it seems to me A LOT, you cannot make everybody happy.
So she wants more pauses. Maybe she is right, but I remember Daniel saying, "If they don't make sense, don't do them" Probably others would find it dragging were it any longer. Here it seems to me A LOT, you cannot make everybody happy.
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..
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Sylvia's girl
- Posts: 11961
- Joined: Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:57 am
Betrayal, The Obfuscation of Suffering
I perused the playbill for the latest production of Betrayal staring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Rafe Spall high above the tower of seats that the Barrymore Theater calls the rear mezzanine. I was looking for something. The last time I saw a Harold Pinter play I was left more confused than anything else. This time I was determined to find out more about what I might find out about the Nobel Prize winning playwright.
Betrayal has a storyline, a timeline, and narrative: the storyline about a love triangle between two best friends, Robert (Daniel Craig) and Jerry (Rafe Spall), and Robert’s wife Emma (Rachel Weisz); the timeline is a reverse chronology of the relationships between the three; and the narrative is an exploration of emotional proximity. That is to say, it is a study in how we position ourselves between and around things and people in order to convey our hurt and love without ever having to be accountable for it.
Each character spends their time on stage trying to get the other characters to step up and be vulnerable. This process is made all the more obtuse by the sheer guarded Britishness of the play and the actors.
I’m unsure as to what to attribute Weisz’s initial disconnection with the audience. Perhaps the star is still nervous about her Broadway debut; she was primarily Rachel Weisz her first few appearances on the stage, but as the night wore on she blossomed into Emma, a wistfully potent woman and lover.
It is also possible that the disconnection was purposeful by veteran director Mike Nichols who used Pinter’s arid prose to hold the audience’s interest at bay, setting them up for a drop, like long ride towards the crest of a roller-coaster. However, while there were emotional drops, the drops were never in unison. Yes, every play is a series of scenes, and of course a play that is structured by year is serial by design. However, just because a play is serialized does not mean it has to be segmented.
Nonetheless, there were enough moments of true, honest depth that the production had impact. An early scene with Robert and Jerry was an exercise in attention as Pinter’s dialogue flew through the air, leaving nothing but trails of vapor. A later scene between the two men, set in an Italian restaurant in London, reveals a fraternity that gives the production it’s most substantial dose of gravitas. Weisz was more than an emotional and sexual lightening rod for the men surrounding her, she fell into character with such exponential grace that Emma was the hardest to say goodbye to when the lights when off.
It was cool to see James Bond on stage, and Craig did well to bring authenticity to the time period with his long ‘70s haircut, but it was Spall who carried the production. If you are lucky enough and rich enough to see this when it opens, he will be the one who bonds the cast into a fluid, serialized expedition through the joyful suffering of love, friendship, and betrayal.
http://www.youngandfictitious.com/2013/ ... suffering/
I perused the playbill for the latest production of Betrayal staring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Rafe Spall high above the tower of seats that the Barrymore Theater calls the rear mezzanine. I was looking for something. The last time I saw a Harold Pinter play I was left more confused than anything else. This time I was determined to find out more about what I might find out about the Nobel Prize winning playwright.
Betrayal has a storyline, a timeline, and narrative: the storyline about a love triangle between two best friends, Robert (Daniel Craig) and Jerry (Rafe Spall), and Robert’s wife Emma (Rachel Weisz); the timeline is a reverse chronology of the relationships between the three; and the narrative is an exploration of emotional proximity. That is to say, it is a study in how we position ourselves between and around things and people in order to convey our hurt and love without ever having to be accountable for it.
Each character spends their time on stage trying to get the other characters to step up and be vulnerable. This process is made all the more obtuse by the sheer guarded Britishness of the play and the actors.
I’m unsure as to what to attribute Weisz’s initial disconnection with the audience. Perhaps the star is still nervous about her Broadway debut; she was primarily Rachel Weisz her first few appearances on the stage, but as the night wore on she blossomed into Emma, a wistfully potent woman and lover.
It is also possible that the disconnection was purposeful by veteran director Mike Nichols who used Pinter’s arid prose to hold the audience’s interest at bay, setting them up for a drop, like long ride towards the crest of a roller-coaster. However, while there were emotional drops, the drops were never in unison. Yes, every play is a series of scenes, and of course a play that is structured by year is serial by design. However, just because a play is serialized does not mean it has to be segmented.
Nonetheless, there were enough moments of true, honest depth that the production had impact. An early scene with Robert and Jerry was an exercise in attention as Pinter’s dialogue flew through the air, leaving nothing but trails of vapor. A later scene between the two men, set in an Italian restaurant in London, reveals a fraternity that gives the production it’s most substantial dose of gravitas. Weisz was more than an emotional and sexual lightening rod for the men surrounding her, she fell into character with such exponential grace that Emma was the hardest to say goodbye to when the lights when off.
It was cool to see James Bond on stage, and Craig did well to bring authenticity to the time period with his long ‘70s haircut, but it was Spall who carried the production. If you are lucky enough and rich enough to see this when it opens, he will be the one who bonds the cast into a fluid, serialized expedition through the joyful suffering of love, friendship, and betrayal.
http://www.youngandfictitious.com/2013/ ... suffering/
I have posted this before in the news section. It's a review dated 13 October
http://upstage-downstage.blogspot.co.uk ... style.html
‘Betrayal’: Backstabbing British Style
American audiences tend to like their domestic dramas to be…well…dramatic. George and Martha going for the jugular in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or perhaps the monstrous Violet Weston spewing venom at her loved ones in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County.
Against this backdrop, what to make of the celebrity revival (Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz star; Mike Nichols directs) of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, now in an all-but-sold-out limited engagement at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre?
Betrayal, which was first produced in 1978, lacks the vicious bite of the aforementioned works. It lacks, as well, the air of menace and mystery that Pinter had come to be associated with from his earlier plays (The Homecoming is perhaps the best example). And even though Pinter fiddles with the passage of time, mostly working backward over a period of a decade in the lives of the characters, Betrayal is quite straightforward and unexpectedly easy to follow.
Because of this, you may be lulled into thinking there is not much to it, the deconstructing of a now-ended affair, where menace and mystery have been replaced by subtlety and style. Yet eschewing the sturm und drang embraced by the likes of Albee and Letts, Pinter still manages to show us a world that is every bit as ugly and hurtful as those other playwrights conjured up in their far noisier works.
Indeed, it is the characteristically British repression of feelings and the silences born of determined pride, upbringing, and social constraints, that contribute to the sad tale this many-layered play brings to the fore.
Betrayal is written in 9 short scenes, the first of which takes place in 1977 as Emma (Ms. Weisz) and Jerry (Rafe Spall) meet for a drink two years after their seven-year affair has ended, and the last in 1968 when it begins. Each scene is self-contained, yet each provides a piece of the puzzle that needs to be combined with the others in order to make sense of the whole.
Mike Nichols has directed the play as if it were a musical composition with nine interlaced movements—theme and variations—a concept that is helped along by the performance between scenes of actual piano and cello music composed for the production by James Murphy. (I pause to note that at the performance I attended, members of the audience clapped at the end of each scene, much as some concertgoers clap at the end of movements in a classical musical performance).
The play’s title is informative enough about the main theme, although a better title might be Betrayals, since there are many such little murders taking place. Apart from the obvious one of Emma and Jerry’s affair (both have been married to their respective spouses for the entire time), we find that Emma’s husband Robert (Mr. Craig) has been having affairs himself over the years, and that Robert and Jerry, reportedly the best of friends, have betrayed each other as well through lies and secrets.
What is especially striking in all of this meshugaas is the play’s reflection of the place of women in the societal hierarchy—at a time when, at least in the U.S., the women’s rights movement was at its zenith. Emma seems to have fallen into her affair with Jerry only because he has paid attention to her in a way her husband hasn’t, yet far from feeling empowered, or at least feeling like the equal to her conniving spouse (sauce for the goose, etc.), she steps into the same domestic role with Jerry that she has led at home.
The playwright makes much use of domestic imagery when it comes to Emma--how she looks in her apron, the tablecloth she brings to the rented room where she and Jerry meet, and her cooking of dinner. Robert also casually mentions hitting her on occasion, and he makes it clear to her that women are not invited to tag along when he hangs out with his male friends. The play’s most overt act of cruelty takes place in a scene in which Robert, on vacation with Emma in Italy, coerces her into admitting to the affair—although it is the opportunity to display the power he has over her rather than any real dismay at the revelation that drives his behavior. The rules, it seems, have been written by the men. Women play the game at their own risk.
Betrayal offers a striking commentary on the age-old battle between the sexes, and it could certainly lead to some interesting post-play discussions among male/female couples who attend together, especially around concepts like blame and responsibility.
One imagines that Mr. Craig and Ms. Weisz, a couple in real-life, had such conversations while preparing for their performances. Both actors are excellent in their respective roles, as is Mr. Spall as Jerry—a feckless man’s man whose own motivations remain as unclear as those of his counterparts. He plays the game because that’s what men do.
In Pinter’s world, there is no end to the cycle of treachery. No one learns any lessons, and the game goes on unabated. In its own relentlessly quiet way, Betrayal is far more disturbing than any of its more confrontational counterparts.
http://upstage-downstage.blogspot.co.uk ... style.html
‘Betrayal’: Backstabbing British Style
American audiences tend to like their domestic dramas to be…well…dramatic. George and Martha going for the jugular in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or perhaps the monstrous Violet Weston spewing venom at her loved ones in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County.
Against this backdrop, what to make of the celebrity revival (Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz star; Mike Nichols directs) of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, now in an all-but-sold-out limited engagement at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre?
Betrayal, which was first produced in 1978, lacks the vicious bite of the aforementioned works. It lacks, as well, the air of menace and mystery that Pinter had come to be associated with from his earlier plays (The Homecoming is perhaps the best example). And even though Pinter fiddles with the passage of time, mostly working backward over a period of a decade in the lives of the characters, Betrayal is quite straightforward and unexpectedly easy to follow.
Because of this, you may be lulled into thinking there is not much to it, the deconstructing of a now-ended affair, where menace and mystery have been replaced by subtlety and style. Yet eschewing the sturm und drang embraced by the likes of Albee and Letts, Pinter still manages to show us a world that is every bit as ugly and hurtful as those other playwrights conjured up in their far noisier works.
Indeed, it is the characteristically British repression of feelings and the silences born of determined pride, upbringing, and social constraints, that contribute to the sad tale this many-layered play brings to the fore.
Betrayal is written in 9 short scenes, the first of which takes place in 1977 as Emma (Ms. Weisz) and Jerry (Rafe Spall) meet for a drink two years after their seven-year affair has ended, and the last in 1968 when it begins. Each scene is self-contained, yet each provides a piece of the puzzle that needs to be combined with the others in order to make sense of the whole.
Mike Nichols has directed the play as if it were a musical composition with nine interlaced movements—theme and variations—a concept that is helped along by the performance between scenes of actual piano and cello music composed for the production by James Murphy. (I pause to note that at the performance I attended, members of the audience clapped at the end of each scene, much as some concertgoers clap at the end of movements in a classical musical performance).
The play’s title is informative enough about the main theme, although a better title might be Betrayals, since there are many such little murders taking place. Apart from the obvious one of Emma and Jerry’s affair (both have been married to their respective spouses for the entire time), we find that Emma’s husband Robert (Mr. Craig) has been having affairs himself over the years, and that Robert and Jerry, reportedly the best of friends, have betrayed each other as well through lies and secrets.
What is especially striking in all of this meshugaas is the play’s reflection of the place of women in the societal hierarchy—at a time when, at least in the U.S., the women’s rights movement was at its zenith. Emma seems to have fallen into her affair with Jerry only because he has paid attention to her in a way her husband hasn’t, yet far from feeling empowered, or at least feeling like the equal to her conniving spouse (sauce for the goose, etc.), she steps into the same domestic role with Jerry that she has led at home.
The playwright makes much use of domestic imagery when it comes to Emma--how she looks in her apron, the tablecloth she brings to the rented room where she and Jerry meet, and her cooking of dinner. Robert also casually mentions hitting her on occasion, and he makes it clear to her that women are not invited to tag along when he hangs out with his male friends. The play’s most overt act of cruelty takes place in a scene in which Robert, on vacation with Emma in Italy, coerces her into admitting to the affair—although it is the opportunity to display the power he has over her rather than any real dismay at the revelation that drives his behavior. The rules, it seems, have been written by the men. Women play the game at their own risk.
Betrayal offers a striking commentary on the age-old battle between the sexes, and it could certainly lead to some interesting post-play discussions among male/female couples who attend together, especially around concepts like blame and responsibility.
One imagines that Mr. Craig and Ms. Weisz, a couple in real-life, had such conversations while preparing for their performances. Both actors are excellent in their respective roles, as is Mr. Spall as Jerry—a feckless man’s man whose own motivations remain as unclear as those of his counterparts. He plays the game because that’s what men do.
In Pinter’s world, there is no end to the cycle of treachery. No one learns any lessons, and the game goes on unabated. In its own relentlessly quiet way, Betrayal is far more disturbing than any of its more confrontational counterparts.
Last edited by cassandra on Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.