Betrayal Brings Harold Pinter's Backward-Told Love Triangle to 1st Stage This October
Emma, Robert and Jerry have history, and 1st Stage is inviting audiences to watch that history come undone in reverse. Harold Pinter's Betrayal opens at the Tysons theatre on October 8 and runs through October 25, with Artistic Director Alex Levy directing a cast of three returning 1st Stage artists.
The play begins at the end. Emma's marriage to Robert is collapsing, and she reconnects with Jerry, her former lover and her husband's closest friend. From that first scene the action moves steadily backward across nearly a decade, from the awkward aftermath of an affair to its origins, so that the audience always knows more than the characters do about where their choices will lead. What emerges is something at once utterly domestic and quietly dangerous, a story that uncovers hidden truths and reveals how little we really know about the people we believe we know best. Much of the play's weight lives in what goes unsaid, in the pauses and evasions that have become synonymous with Pinter's name.
Betrayal premiered at London's National Theatre in 1978, directed by Peter Hall with Michael Gambon, Penelope Wilton and Daniel Massey, and it won the Olivier Award for best new play. Pinter drew on his own seven-year affair with the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, which had taken place while both were married, though he reshaped the material considerably. The reverse chronology was startling at the time and has since become one of the most imitated structural ideas in modern drama. The play was adapted into a 1983 film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge, and it has returned to Broadway again and again, with Juliette Binoche and Liev Schreiber in 2000, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in 2013, and Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox in Jamie Lloyd's stripped-down 2019 production. Pinter, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, died in 2008, and Betrayal remains among the most frequently produced of his works, valued by actors for the depth it demands from a deceptively spare script.
The 1st Stage production reunites three performers familiar to the company's audiences. Katrina Clark, previously seen in Proof, The Farnsworth Invention and Laughs in Spanish, plays Emma. Shawn Sebastian Naar, whose 1st Stage credits include Young Americans, Between Riverside and Crazy and The Piano Lesson, and Jaysen Wright, who appeared in The Royale and Take Me Out, complete the triangle. Levy, whose recent work at 1st Stage includes Indecent, Birthday Candles, The Lake Effect and The Waverly Gallery, directs.
The design team includes scenic design by Kathryn Kawecki, lighting design by 1st Stage Production Manager Luis Garcia, sound design by Kenny Neal, costume design by Lynly Saunders and props design by Jordan Ingersoll. Susan Lynskey serves as dialect coach and Lorraine Ressegger-Slone as intimacy director.
Performances run Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 pm, Saturdays at 2 pm and 7:30 pm, and Sundays at 2 pm. Betrayal runs a tight ninety minutes or so without intermission in most productions, making it an easy evening to fit in, and a hard one to shake off afterward.