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Benedict Nightingale, The Times, May 28 2011
The play was slated when it opened in 1978. As it returns, Benedict Nightingale explains why he wrote its only rave review. The Birthday Party in 1958 was Harold Pinter’s most notorious flop. “You poor chap,” said an usher when the dramatist joined six people in the stalls at the end of its one-week run. But his Betrayal 20 years later promised to be almost as disastrous. “Pinter, master of ambiguity, is blankly obvious,” wrote a leading critic. “Pitifully thin,” added another. “High-class soap opera.” And yet Betrayal, like The Birthday Party, was named in a National Theatre poll as a key play of the 20th century, is performed all over the world and, next week, gets the latest of many London revivals, this time with Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles as the duo whose platonic bond seems deeper than their love for Kristin Scott Thomas. Here, let me immodestly declare an interest in the play. Back in 1978, as drama critic for the New Statesman, I was a dissenting voice: I liked it. No, I loved it. How could I not when it left my wife and myself discussing its subtleties for hours after I saw it, a privilege denied to critics who could not, like me, prepare a considered notice for a weekly mag. I’ll doubtless have to apologise to scores of dramatists in the next world — sorry for calling you a blimp, John Osborne — but my review of Betrayal is the one that I’d most like to see pinned up in the bar where I hope to share ambrosia cocktails with Pinter. So what offended virtually all of my critical colleagues? Well, Peter Hall’s original production opened at the National at a time when dramatists who didn’t deal with political issues were regularly accused by reviewers of being irresponsibly escapist. That now seems ironic, for in the 1980s Pinter himself began to write the angry radical plays that alienated the less politically aware. But in 1978 Betrayal was seen as theatrical backsliding. What happens? In 1968 Jerry, a literary agent, launches an affair with Emma, who is married to his best friend, the publisher Robert. In 1973 Robert finds out about a liaison that takes another two years to burn out, not revealing his knowledge to Jerry but continuing their lunches and squash games. And in 1977 Emma, who has taken a new lover, discovers that Robert has been unfaithful to her for years and ends their marriage. “Bleak and disturbing,” wrote Hall in his diary after reading it, adding that it was also funny, impeccably written and “weaves a very cunning web”. Indeed, it does. For one thing, the story is mostly told backwards. For another, the politics of infidelity — Robert doesn’t know if Jerry knows he knows, or knows Emma knows he knows — and the definition of betrayal becomes increasingly intricate. And, as we discovered in Michael Billington’s fine biography of Pinter in 1996, it’s largely based on an actual love. Asked about the play’s genesis, Pinter said that he saw a man and a woman in deep conversation in a pub and began to imagine and write, but he was also drawing on memories of his affair with Joan Bakewell between 1962 and 1969. That was while he was unhappily married to the actress Vivien Merchant but before he met his second wife, Antonia Fraser: relationships, he later declared, were “totally irrelevant” to the play. What was relevant was that Joan’s husband, the BBC producer Michael Bakewell, continued to work with Pinter without revealing that he knew of the affair. That had horrified Pinter as much as Joan Bakewell was appalled when she learnt from him that the play contained true incidents. Well, Joan accepted Pinter’s explanation that “it’s a play, it’s a play”. She understood that, as Fraser was to write in her memoir, Must You Go?, he was “torn between two desperate emotions, sympathy and the ruthlessness of the artist”. But the anxieties weren’t over since the National was threatened with strikes that were driving its artistic director almost to suicide. Though an equally worried Pinter was walking around saying he “felt like a lump of lead”, and the cast was suffering from first-night tension that Hall called “the most cruel of my experience”, the play did open on time, only to be derided as “pinheaded drama”. And here’s where I enter the story, with Fraser phoning Pinter to tell him that I’d written a rave in the New Statesman calling my critical colleagues “glassy-eyed and furry-eared oafs”. The results were invitations to lunch and dinner, at which I recall Pinter reading Samuel Beckett’s warm reaction to Betrayal’s playing with time: “that first last look in the shadows, after all those in the light to come, a curtain of curtains”. The review wasn’t such a feat on my part, since it seemed easy to admire a play that, as I then wrote, “is one of Pinter’s most successful exercises in presenting the least and evoking the most”, adding that there was no line into which desire, pain, alarm, regret, sorrow, rage, fear or love hadn’t been compressed, like volatile gas in a dangerously unstable cylinder. Ask Peter Hall, who saw its “immense strength of feelings underneath”. Dig up and quiz Ralph Richardson, who thought it “a beautiful play beautifully performed”. Or talk to Henshall (Jerry in Ian Rickson’s current production): “I didn’t know the play at all and was knocked out when I read it. It’s a perfect piece, compact and spare. The betrayals go on and on, they’re very wounding and they work on several levels. Things get murkier and murkier and deeper and deeper and deeper. It’s like getting a stepladder and going down and down and down. But what does it finally mean? That’s for the audience to decide.” |