There is something uniquely sublime about Harold Pinter’s dialogue: direct and unfancy yet veiled, charged, and evasive. It’s a challenge and a boon for actors, whose delivery is key. And in his 1978 play Betrayal, loosely based on a long-term affair Pinter had while married to actress Vivien Merchant, the words are as shrouded and trenchant as ever.
Betrayal is currently playing at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater in a coproduction with the Harbor Stage Company. And though WHAT’s producing artistic director, Christopher Ostrom, served as scenic designer, the play feels very much like an intact and intimate Harbor Stage show imported to the vast Julie Harris Stage. Harbor Stage’s artistic director and co-founder Robert Kropf directed, and his fellow Harbor Stage co-founders Brenda Withers and Jonathan Fielding star as the extramarital lovers, Emma and Jerry. The third member of the play’s triangle, Emma’s husband, Robert, is played by Harbor Stage regular William Zielinski, and the role of the waiter is played by Ari Lew, who starred in Bread and Butter, a play by Withers that premiered at the Harbor Stage this summer. Lighting designer John Malinowski has worked regularly with both companies.
The result of this merging of resources is thrilling, an unforgettable theater event for the Outer Cape. Pinter’s iced-over emotions seem even more alienating within the unadorned WHAT space. It’s hard to imagine that these private moments between three members of the British cultural elite, a publisher, his wife, and his oft-noted “best man,” a literary agent, would feel the same in the compact quarters of the Harbor Stage — even though that’s exactly where WHAT originated. The Harbor Stage Company grew out of that shared WHAT experience.
Betrayal is notable for being a play told in reverse chronology, much like Kaufman and Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along and the Sondheim musical adapted from it. The effect — to travel from the sour present to the passionate past — is not as gimmicky as it sounds. Pinter’s transitions are seamless, and the backward trajectory is an especially revealing way of showing how the layering of betrayals over time causes bitterness and despair. Kropf flashes the chronology shifts on the stage’s backdrop, and they follow as logically and precisely as a surgeon’s scalpel into the characters’ stories.
I saw Betrayal at a 2000 Broadway revival, with Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber, and John Slattery, and watched the 1983 movie adaptation, with Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, and Patricia Hodge, and I can comfortably assert that the WHAT–Harbor Stage production is superior to both. The movie may have more punch, but in comparison it’s overwrought, and the Broadway revival had less edge. As usual with great plays, adapting them for the screen makes the settings too realistic and takes away from the beauty of the language, especially Pinter’s. (Kingsley’s hammy performance doesn’t help.)
In contrast, Zielinski is pitch-perfect as Robert. His scenes with Fielding, when he knows his best friend is cuckolding him and then when he doesn’t, are chilling, mostly because of his nonplussed reactions and the subtlety of his zingers. He’s less competitive and resentful than the other Roberts I’ve seen, and it serves the play well.
As Emma, the woman both men try to possess, Withers is silky and stoic, with a touch of ennui. There is, as always, a twinkle in her eye that conveys her allure, but she’s clearly the grown-up when confronting Jerry’s bravado. Fielding, as the most transparent of the three leads, is thoroughly convincing and, ultimately, pathetic, particularly when you see him set the affair in motion with heartfelt determination.
Kropf directs with impressive restraint. On the mostly bare stage — a couple of plastic chairs are the only props — he keeps the characters moving in ways that are so emotionally exact as to be invisible. Despite the modernist design and fractured chronology, Betrayal is actually a fairly realistic and straightforward play. There are no absurd twists or fourth-wall-breaking interruptions.
The lack of sentimentality is crucial to establishing the right tone for the play. This is a story of privileged, successful people. They’re not drowning in sorrow, and melodrama would be inappropriate. They simply coast, somewhat recklessly, into a destructive situation and make the best of it.
If you want to see top-quality theater locally, go see Betrayal. It will be a night to remember.
Three on a Match
The event: Betrayal, by Harold Pinter
The time: Through Oct. 14, Tuesday through Saturday at 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
The cost: $42.50; seniors, $38.50; students and partial view seats, $17.50
