Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
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by Harold Pinter, directed by Daniel Brooks
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Premiere Dance Theatre, Toronto
September 7-30, 2000;
National Arts Centre, Ottawa
October 10-21, 2000
Emma: “It’s nice, sometimes, to think back”.
On the evidence of the last three shows of his I’ve seen, Daniels Brooks is one of the very finest directors now working in Toronto. His direction of Goethe’s “Faust, Part 1” for the Tarragon in 1999 was extraordinary in bringing out the eternal modernity of that monumental work. His staging of Beckett’s “Endgame” for Soulpepper earlier that year was also a triumph. And so is his production for them this year of Pinter’s 1978 classic, “Betrayal”. Different as these three are, all of them involve characters poised on the brink of self-mockery and despair. Fittingly, Brooks is able to situate the mood in each on the knife edge between comedy and tragedy. Uniting all three productions is Brooks’s trademark minimalist style. In Goethe this style helped sandblast away almost two centuries of received opinion and made the play seem new. For Beckett and Pinter, already writing in a minimalist style, there is no more suitable approach.
The plot of “Betrayal” follows the affair between Emma (Susan Coyne) and Jerry (Albert Schultz) and the way in which Emma’s husband Robert (Diego Matamoros), who is also Jerry’s best friend, comes to know about it. We first meet Jerry and Emma in a pub in 1977, two years affair their affair has ended, where Emma tells Jerry not only that her marriage with Robert has broken up but that Robert had known about their affair for four years. After a subsequent scene between Jerry and Robert, the scenes move backward in time until we reach a hotel room in Venice in 1973--literally the central scene of nine--when Robert discovers his wife’s affair with Jerry. We see the repercussions in two further scenes, before moving backwards twice more to 1968 when Robert first declares his love for Emma. The beginning of the play is thus the end of things for the characters, confirming the end of the affair and the marriage, while the end of the play shows us the beginning of the action, Jerry’s declaration of love to Emma, that sets this destruction in motion.
In a play where the question “When did you know?” is so important and frequent, Pinter uses this non-chronological scheme to put the audience in the same predicament as his characters We are forced to piece together the sequence of events just as they do. Thanks to the clear markers Pinter puts in the play—a tablecloth brought back from Venice or the age of Emma’s son Ned—an attentive audience can follow the action backwards and note the three times when it moves forwards. Thanks to Daniel Brooks’s precise direction, we soon enough orient ourselves when the lights go up on each scene as to when and where we are. It is, however, built into the play that we should momentarily lose our bearings with each new scene.
Brooks knows precisely how to gauge what minimum is necessary to achieve the maximum effect on stage and the maximum multivalence of the text. John Thompson’s set consists of two grey squares—one the playing area, one the back wall with a door set flush in it. This starkness moves the play out of the time period Pinter specifies to make it more universal. The presence and placement of certain key props—two chairs, a hatstand, a table, a bar trolley—are all, along with Richard Feren’s sound design, that is needed to tell apart the seven locations. Thompson’s simple, well-chosen costumes tell us our direction in time primarily by making Coyne and Matamoros seem younger as the play progresses. The decision was made that Schultz as Jerry would wear the same costume throughout the play, while the other two have several costume changes. This decision seems to cast the action of the play as Jerry’s own reflection. In the first scene Emma says “it’s nice, sometimes, to think back”, something Jerry refuses to do. But, as Brooks directs it, we the audience see the memories that Jerry has repressed. Jerry repeatedly discovers that knew far less what was really occurring than did the other two.
Andrea Lundy’s expert use of light also suggests we are travelling backwards through memory. A sudden square of light becomes a picture, an oval is a mirror, a large rectangle a bed. A square border of light around the floor makes a room momentarily seem like a boxing ring as Jerry and Robert compete not only in business but for possession of Emma. Brooks thus locates his production between the naturalistic and the imagined. He calls forth the theatrical metaphor simply by having the actors themselves move the few props on and off the square set, so that what we see can be thought of also as a re-enactment.
A minimalist production places even greater weight on the words and acting. Albert Schultz as the most naïve of the three has the least interesting part. He plays Jerry as a kind of innocent, far less proficient at hiding his thoughts than Emma or Robert. As per Brooks’s direction, he is not required to become younger as the play progresses. Susan Coyne as Emma gives one of her best ever performances. Her character is more expert than Jerry at hiding her thoughts, but Coyne allows us to see unspoken ideas flicker across her face and gives Emma an overall nervousness that belies the calm she tries to project. She also becomes noticeably younger and less racked with care as the action moves back in time. Diego Matamoros turns in yet another superb performance, merging into a character in full control, completely unlike the pathetic, drunken doctor he played only two months ago in “Platonov”. He makes Robert a study of rage held tightly in check, bursting out only once in a single word in the central scene in Venice. He is superb at showing through gesture and intonation the varying degrees with which he has come to terms with his anger. Tony Nappo makes the most of his small part as the waiter in an Italian restaurant.
Unlike Bogen Productions' "Ashes to Ashes" that played here earlier this year, the actors in "Betrayal" do not use British accents. Initially, I was worried that the actors were not using Pinter's frequent pauses to the greatest effect. I eventually came to think that Brooks, in Canadianizing the accents had also Canadianized the pauses, making them shorter than a British context would permit. Brooks allows the first few scenes to be played as a kind of comedy of misunderstood language. However, as the play progress the laughter becomes less and less so that Robert's confession of love to Emma at the end has, through the play's irony of hindsight, the impact of tragedy. Each of the characters has betrayed the others to the extent that they are no longer fit to make judgments of any kind since they have so compromised their own values. Language has been perverted so that it conceals more often than expresses thought. Brooks wisely omits the intermission Pinter suggests, giving the play in a mere 85 minutes a cumulative power that amazes.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Susan Coyne and Diego Matamoros. ©2000 Jeremy Maude.
2000-09-22
Betrayal