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With
Sigrid Thornton
Richard Piper
Martin Jacobs
Adriano Cortese
An illicit love affair unravels from its bitter end to its blissful beginning. At the beginning of the play, Robert admits to having known of the affair between his wife, Emma, and their best friend, Jerry.
Each subsequent scene is set further back in time, revealing the lies and acrimony that have been festering beneath the surface since the affair began.
Direction: Kate Cherry
Design: Anna Borghesi
Lighting Design: David Murray
Composer: Ian McDonald
Visit the Melbourne Theatre Company Web Site: www.mtc.com.au
Review
By SIAN PRIOR
Special Thanks to The Age Newspaper - www.theage.com.au
One of the most surprising facts about this latest MTC production of Harold Pinter's play Betrayal is that it represents Sigrid Thornton's stage debut. Theatre observers noted the canny (or opportunistic) casting of the SeaChange star in an MTC season full of TV personalities. After all those years on screen, how would she fare without the adoring eye of the camera?
Let's deal with this topic up front. Yes, Sigrid Thornton is just as luminescent on stage as she is on TV, and the casting call was a good one. As Emma, the woman who has a long affair with her husband's best friend, Thornton is sexy, naive and yet ruthless in her determination to “have her cake and eat it too”. All of which sounds rather like Seachange's Laura, doesn't it?
Betrayal is ostensibly a play about marital infidelity. Emma is seduced by her husband's best man Jerry (Richard Piper), and they spend seven years meeting as lovers in a rented flat. Eventually, husband Robert (Martin Jacobs) finds out, and when the play opens, the affair has been over for two years and Emma and Robert's marriage is on the rocks. We learn about this history in reverse chronology, so that by the end of the play the affair is just about to begin.
The betrayals, however, go much deeper than this affair. Layer upon layer of deception is built up between these three people. The one relationship that may survive this moral mess is the men's friendship and perhaps this is the one which mattered most to Jerry and Robert all along.
Pinter's influence on 20th century theatre is such that the term “Pinteresque” has become a useful shorthand for a style of writing. The dialogue is deceptively banal, the pauses frequent, and the subject matter often irritatingly circular. All of this allows for the rare moments of strong passion to stand out in stark relief.
Kate Cherry's confident hand is evident in the direction, which never drags in spite of those pauses. Martin Jacobs is utterly convincing as the suave, misogynistic husband Robert who happily confesses to giving his wife a good bashing now and then. Richard Piper's Jerry is always likeable, even when he's taking his cuckolded best friend to lunch.
Anna Borghesi's open set design adapts neatly into cafe, flat, hotel and home. The hard, shiny surfaces match the shallowness of these people's lives. Special mention must go to the composer Ian McDonald, whose staccato music punctuates each scene.
Betrayal was shown at the Fairfax studio, Victorian Arts Centre, 100 St Kilda Road, Melbourne.
Rating: ****
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