Tag Archives: Harold Pinter

Betrayal

23 Jul

I know a lot of us justify the fact we’re yet to win a Nobel Prize in Literature by telling ourselves that it’s really just about who you know.

However, Betrayal by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter raises the disturbing spectre that the prize might also be awarded to those of genuine genius.

Several years ago, and for quite some time, Jerry had an affair with Emma, the wife of Robert, his best friend. Pinter tells most of the story through a reverse chronology, ultimately ending at the beginning.

The impact of reversing the tale’s chronology is twofold.

Firstly, it facilitates dramatic irony. Lies become more apparent, like shards of glass in sunlight. The audience delights in discovering the ways the characters have not been open and honest about the past.

But Pinter’s unconventional structure is not about giving the characters some sort of back history that explains or justifies their infidelity. (I’ve never been a fan of plays that use flashback to explain the present, feeling the question What happens next? is always more interesting than Why did that happen?) What Pinter does is more akin to what a craft-person working in the plastic arts might do. He crafts an object from the concept of betrayal, leaving us as unconcerned with narrative as we would be with, say, a small glass ornament. Instead, the concept is held up to the light, and we’re given glimpses from different angles, to marvel at the way the Truth is tainted.

This leads me to the other stroke of genius displayed in this unconventional structure: it weakens the sense of the passing of Time, as though whatever it is that is being betrayed is beyond Time – which, of course, it is. Every committed relationship we have is an attempt to transcend Time, to deny its inevitabilities, to say This Always, despite all Life’s vagaries.

And this hope filled fantasy of permanence aligns with how we usually think about ourselves as individuals. We imagine we’re like some solid object somehow caught in the current of Time. It’s as though we’ve accidentally fallen into that mysterious river and our natural element is elsewhere. Yes, we acknowledge the current will ultimately beat and batter us till destruction – that’s just a matter of Time – but we don’t see ourselves as fundamentally a part of the world that does that, but somehow outside and opposed to it. The soul-expanding thrill of Pinter’s play about deception is that the characters are continually shocked to discover that their secrets were always known, that their belief in their separation from the wider world was an illusion all along.

Cristabel Sved directs a wonderful production of this superb play. The staging is suitably and deliciously simple. Performances are excellent, offered in a gorgeous understatement that both highlights the glib naivety of those who deny realities greater than themselves, and which creates all the more poignancy when genuine vulnerability and passion are revealed.

Let me highlight a few moments of utter dramatic magic: the deeply human fragility of Ella Scott Lynch as Emma when she is simultaneously known to be unfaithful and aware the affair is over; Andrew Cutcliffe as Robert at a restaurant, cutlery in hand, barely containing his anger towards his supposed best friend; and Matt Hardie and Lynch as the two lovers, in the scene where their affair begins, so wanting to see life-affirming magic in what’s just a garden-variety curse; and Diego Retamales in a terrific comic cameo.

Paul Gilchrist

Betrayal by Harold Pinter

presented by Sport for Jove

until 10 Aug at the Old Fitz

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Kate Williams

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Lover & The Dumb Waiter

8 May

Directed by Mark Kilmurry, this is an evening of two short works by the great Harold Pinter.

Everyone’s familiar with the famous Pinter pause, that cessation of dialogue that acknowledges the world’s incomprehensibility, and seems to respond with all the world’s malevolence.

These two works employ the Pinter pause sparingly, preferring instead a related technique: the gap in exposition.

Take The Dumb Waiter. Two hit men wait in a basement room for instructions regarding their next job. We don’t know who their target will be. We don’t know why they will be targeted. We don’t know who issues the instructions. The dumb waiter installed in the room delivers food orders as though from a café above, and we don’t know why these orders make the hit men so very anxious. Only one of these uncertainties is clarified in the course of the piece, but this clarification only births further uncertainties.

Kilmurry fully embraces the comic possibilities of the scenario, and Gareth Davies and Anthony Taufa play the hitmen with terrific humour. (If Tarantino hasn’t seen a good production of The Dumb Waiter, I’d be shocked.) But Davies and Taufa also poignantly convey a rising panic, a terror in the face of power structures they know exist but don’t understand.

And that’s what the gaps in exposition do: they invite us into a similarly disorientating, dangerous world; they ask us to consider whether it reflects our experience, as individuals who are neither impotent nor omnipotent, who suffer from arbitrary power but are also complicit in its tyranny.

If The Dumb Waiter is comic, The Lover is even more so. Richard and Sarah are husband and wife, but she openly has an afternoon lover. Davies and Nicole Da Silva present this surprising couple with a delicious straight-faced matter-of-factness. Both performers glory in the particularly middle-class language Pinter gifts these characters, a dialect that’s precise yet euphemistic, fussy yet biting. Having presented an unexpected but believable relationship, Pinter proceeds, in splendid comic scenes, to reveal its complexities. But he never does so completely, once again allowing gaps in exposition to invite (or is it necessitate?) our full engagement.

Romantic love is an odd thing. We like to think that in it we can be our true selves, but simultaneously we are playing a role, that of the lover, the projection of the desires of the Other. Like Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, also first produced in 1962, The Lover expresses the collision of the desire for authenticity (the hallmark of the next two decades in Western culture) with the realisation that radical individuality might be a fantasy. Neither impotent nor omnipotent, we are complicit in the illusions from which we suffer – and our attempted solutions merely perpetuate those illusions.

Wonderfully performed and tremendously funny, this double bill is an excellent introduction to Pinter’s genius.

Paul Gilchrist

The Lover & The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter

At Ensemble until June 7

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

Tags: , , , , ,