If you were baffled by The Birthday Party or lost at sea with No Man’s Land (both of which I love), it’s time to give Harold Pinter one more chance by checking out the sly, sophisticated and often wickedly funny production of one of his most accessible plays, Betrayal, which opened Monday at the Goodman.
This chewy morsel of a show, dramatically rich and deeply disquieting, brings significant star power to the Chicago stage in the form of Helen Hunt and Robert Sean Leonard, who convincingly play two sides of a love triangle completed by Ian Barford, who is every inch their acting equal.
So many of life’s mistakes would be avoided if only we refrained from acting on instinct, especially when it comes to romance–and especially especially when it comes to the instincts that lead people to cheat on their spouses. But then again, as they say in the lottery ads, you can’t win if you don’t play. (Though it must be added that the odds of successfully finding happiness and true love down that path are perhaps worse than your chances of winning the Powerball.)
Director Susan V. Booth cannily deploys actors who have lived some life to raise the stakes here and deepen the potentially disastrous fates they are tempting. Emma (Hunt) and Jerry (Leonard) are married when they start a years-long affair so significant that it leads them to secretly buy a flat together.
We never see Jerry’s wife, a busy doctor, but Emma is married to Robert (Barford), who also happens to be Jerry’s best friend and the editor who buys many of the novels Jerry represents as a literary agent. Throw in the two kids each couple have–not to mention the decades of marital memories grand, quotidian, effervescent and painful (movingly depicted via black-and-white photos and film snippets projected onto a scrim between scenes)–and you begin to feel the huge risk involved in pursuing such an illicit romance.
We see the story play out, in London and Venice, over the course of nine scenes told in roughly reverse chronological order starting from when Emma and Jerry meet for drinks two years after breaking off their romance and ending at the tempestuous beginning of the affair.
It’s incredible how easy it can be for people to risk their most important relationships for the heat of an affair. But the reasons why they do so are as myriad as they are understandable: immaturity and lust on one end of the scale; the need for escape and to be truly valued and prioritized on the other. Is the often fleeting reward worth the gamble? Depends who you ask.
In this case, the worst betrayal is committed by one affair partner to the other. Having sold the object of affection on the boundless depth of passion and devotion that awaits, the one who woos turns out, as so often is the case, to have feet of clay with which they grind the affair partner’s dreams of a real life together into dust.
In the end, no one’s happy here, except, perhaps, for the spouse we never meet. But for a good number of years, Emma and Jerry had an awful lot of fun in their secret world of passion. And Robert? He’s no saint, either, and proves wholly unworthy of sympathy.
When the house of cards starts tumbling down, Pinter delivers big laughs in showing how the characters try to claim the moral high ground with each other, only to have the absurdity of their positions pointed out in acid looks and rejoinders. That part is much more fun to watch than to experience first-hand, I should think.
Betrayal runs through March 30 at the Goodman Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Joan Marcus
