A play about silences

Portland Stage Company builds Betrayal

By Katherine Joyce

Harold Pinter's Betrayal Plays at the Portland Stage Company through November 18. Call (207)774-0465

BIZARRE LOVE TRIANGLE: Michael McKenzie, Susan Knight, and Aled Davies in Betrayal.

For those of you who thought the recent film Memento totally original for it’s backward march through a twisted plot of lies and self-deception, think again. Dramatist Harold Pinter, a legend in his own time — how many people do you know with an academic journal devoted entirely to their work? — wrote such a play in 1978. Betrayal is a story — ostensibly about a husband, a wife, and a best friend who becomes the wife’s lover — that unravels and loops back toward its initial act of adultery rather than building from it.

Betrayal has been called “the Pinter play for those who don’t otherwise like Pinter,” in part because it does not contain his signature abstractions and non-sequiturs — why else do you think so many PhDs would be devoted to his work? The spare drama is not solely about adultery or deceiving your loved ones. Its layers ask the audience to examine the smallest untruths and details of their own lives.

With Director Eleanor Holdridge at the helm, Portland Stage Company hopes to draw audiences into Betrayal’s emotional and ethical morass. The Phoenix sat down with Holdridge and the show’s principal actors — Aled Davies as the husband Robert, Susan Knight as his wife Emma, and Michael McKenzie as Robert’s friend and Emma’s lover, Jerry — to talk about PSC’s production.

 

Phoenix: For a play like Betrayal, in which the playwright gives so few stage directions or notes, how do you go about deciding what it should look like?

Eleanor Holdridge: I start by thinking about the play and what it means to me without coming up with any concrete ideas. One thing I care about in Betrayal is that [the characters] have their lives, and yet, outside the strict boundary of their marriages and families, there are other lives for them. It’s not so much about adultery, but the longings, the dreams that these people have.

Another idea I care deeply about in the play is compartmentalization. How can you lead two different lives at two different times? How can you exist within a marriage and then have this completely different life?

 

Phoenix: How do you build those ideas into the sets?

Holdridge: The idea was to create something where we could have scenes in various parts of the stage. We had to consider the practicality of having nine scenes in six different locations. Anita [Stewart, PSC’s Artistic Director] came up with the idea of a turntable. We have a three walls that spin to create different spaces, different compartments. We also wanted to limit the actual furniture and props that the actors use, but make [what they do use] very real.

 

Phoenix: This is a play of such subtext and constant tension. How do you direct that?

Holdridge: [In rehearsal], we do it with the emotions on the surface, so I can tell and the actors can tell what’s going on underneath the scene. [Last week] it was a little too uncovered, so it wasn’t as interesting it’s going to be. [The next step is] to think about why the characters often want to cover what they’re feeling.

 

Phoenix: Other people have interpreted the relationship of the two men, Robert and Jerry, as everything from sexual to just the intimacy of good friends.

Holdridge: In some ways, the deepest betrayal is between the two men. I wonder sometimes if the reason Emma goes for Jerry is that there’s something about what the men have together that she can never get. It’s probably not sexual, but whatever it is. . .there’s love at the base of it. They have this myth — this moment they keep talking about in the play [when Jerry throws Robert and Emma’s daughter up in the air]. It’s this utopian vision of a place where you can express love, where the families blend. It’s this image of shared love.

 

Phoenix: What about all of the places where Pinter writes “pause” or “silence” in the play?

Holdridge: Pinter has talked about how awful it is when he hears actors in other countries — and he’s obviously talking about America — say, ‘Oh look there’s a pause in the script, I have to not say anything for a while.’ The pause is something that’s earned. There’s something important there. A silence is longer than a pause, and it’s when things stretch — it’s a moment between people. [Pinter’s] actually scored the rhythm of the play — he’s scored these moments, he knows where they should be. In rehearsal, the pauses are another piece of information — they say that’s something’s happened. Silences are what is not being said, what could be said, what in that moment could make these people be active.

 

Phoenix: There are so many revelations or realizations in this play that don’t get talked about explicitly. Aled, Michael, and Susan, could you each talk about what happens for your characters in the play?

Aled Davies: Robert finds out many things that are not talked about. What is talked about is that his wife is having an affair. What is inferred is that he finds out that he’s very vulnerable, specifically with the conception of his son. Robert finds out that his best friend is betraying him. He finds out that, for some reason, it’s more important for him not to confront him.

Michael McKenzie: The odd thing about Jerry is that in most scenes the other people are seeing more than he does. Jerry’s in the dark. All of these people are terribly passive. Jerry’s revelations are generally about being lied to, for quite some time, by both these people. It’s also hinted that his wife has been betraying him. And he doesn’t take any action. As an actor, it’s a trap — falling into this passivity — because, actually, Jerry’s working very hard to maintain his denial. He goes to amazing lengths not to face truths he’s not comfortable with.

Susan Knight: We’ve had a lot of discussions about the characters’ motivations. Why do people have affairs? Why do they stay in marriages? Emma is ready to change her life. Eventually, she does, with the gallery and breaking it off with Jerry.

Davies: I wonder if Betrayal is really about the realizations that the characters don’t have. There’s so much Robert doesn’t realize. Robert seems completely unaware that this is going to end as a big train wreck. I guess that’s true to life. We imagine we’ll somehow be exempted. He makes no attempt to win Emma back. He keeps inviting Jerry to go play squash, but that’s about the extent of his trying to win his friend back.

For people to have affairs for years is not unknown. People always say, ‘I knew it all along,’ or ‘I felt it in my bones.’ How the playwright has raised the stakes in this play, in order to make it truly special — he’s written it where everybody does know. The audience knows. That ratchets it up about what an affair is and what adultery is.

Knight: There are so many pieces to it, and it’s so complicated, and yet it started out so simply. They’re young and innocent and look what’s wrought. It’s in the mundane details of people’s lives. A lie or not telling everything — all these things can gradually build on themselves. It’s not what [they] intended.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc can be reached at riverbetweenus@hotmail.com.