BETRAYAL.

Northampton

BETRAYAL
by Harold Pinter

Royal Theatre To 23 November 2002
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 21 November

A revival placing emphasis on what you seeIf the set isn't star of this show, it's not for want of trying. A tiny display on the front 'curtain' gives us the basic timescale, as time loops largely back and occasionally a short time forward in the lives of Emma, her publisher husband Robert and her lover Jerry.

As the years unwind, from the end of the affair to its beginning in a darkened bedroom during Robert and Emma's party years ago, the scenes revealed include the lovers comfortless-seeming tryst-flat, Robert's office, with its solid acreage of desk, the married couple's home, a smart restaurant where Robert overdoses on white wine – his well-oiled indulgence set against the Italian waiter's professional correctness – and an Italian holiday spot.

It's the easy life of publishing and literary representation, one devoid of dirty hands or hard weights. Yet, for all these people's elegant self-control – so assured that the slightest break resounds forcefully – there's a rancidly restricted flavour: the same novelists, Casey and Spinks, recur, the latter writing self-referential autobiography as fiction. (Presumably, given the control and breadth Pinter's play creates from its autobiographical origins, a joke at lesser, instantly and briefly fashionable writers.)

And hanging over them is the weight these characters bear, the detritus of their lives suspended over the stage as furniture, lowered piece by piece, so less and less looms as time unwinds: people create the luggage of their lives.

It's a keen perception by designer Ashley Martin-Davies. The play's world is illustrated too by the colour-splash domestic images which flood the walls as each scene opens. Yet these images soon vanish, leaving bare walls to surround the characters, fading their hopes and plans into blank existences. And the still-lives are accompanied by a video of Robert and Emma's wedding – its final sequence enforcing the men's friendship and suggesting Jerry's desire for Emma precedes that first party.

Which is curiously underwhelming, with its drink-talking advance by Jerry. For the rest, Paula Stockbridge and John Lloyd Fillingham create a convincing sense of their relationship, made the more likely given John McAndrew's over-stolid Robert.

Emma: Paula Stockbridge
Jerry: John Lloyd Fillingham
Robert: John McAndrew
Waiter: Tom Edden

Director: Rupert Goold
Designer: Ashley Martin-Davies
Lighting: Paul Dennant
Video: Lorna Heavey

2002-11-26 12:02:55