Love, deceit and poignant silences; the Abingdon Adult Drama Club lead us through the emotional labyrinth of a seven-year-long extramarital affair in Pinter’s Betrayal. Jerry, a literary agent, is the lover of Emma, who is married to Robert, a book publisher who is also Jerry’s best friend. The play begins two years after the end of Emma and Jerry’s affair and then, scene by scene, proceeds backward, unveiling the network of lies and deception that lay behind it.
Donna Forrest’s performance as Emma exudes repressed pain. Her rigid smile and distant gaze suggest a growing inner torment, which comes to surface in a moment of domestic anguish as she struggles to remove the key from a fiddly key ring. Phil Bower as Robert, however, falls short of expressing that sense of underlying distress. Implausibly, his sublime indifference to the affair shows no sign of concealed heartbreak or anger. The darker side of his character doesn’t quite come through. When he admits, in scene two, to hitting Emma because he ‘just felt like giving her a good bashing. The old itch . . . you understand’, it is hard to picture his wife under his violent hand. You think more of a pesky mosquito.
Periods of silence in this production are often more expressive than words. The actors, however, seem intimidated by Pinter’s famous pauses, being afraid to extend them or to leave them as ambiguous. Michael Ward, as Jerry, fills each silence with a multitude of frowns, which detract from the delicacy of those Pinteresque moments of tension.
And yet, the performers still create an ambience of awkwardness, in which the characters show an inability to relate to one another. There is a lack of prolonged eye contact and a constant shifting of focus that evokes a sense of unease within the Unicorn’s intimate space. And although this production of Betrayal betrays itself as an amateur piece, it remains faithful to the play’s depiction of just how opaque and misleading human relationships can be.
Donna Forrest’s performance as Emma exudes repressed pain. Her rigid smile and distant gaze suggest a growing inner torment, which comes to surface in a moment of domestic anguish as she struggles to remove the key from a fiddly key ring. Phil Bower as Robert, however, falls short of expressing that sense of underlying distress. Implausibly, his sublime indifference to the affair shows no sign of concealed heartbreak or anger. The darker side of his character doesn’t quite come through. When he admits, in scene two, to hitting Emma because he ‘just felt like giving her a good bashing. The old itch . . . you understand’, it is hard to picture his wife under his violent hand. You think more of a pesky mosquito.
Periods of silence in this production are often more expressive than words. The actors, however, seem intimidated by Pinter’s famous pauses, being afraid to extend them or to leave them as ambiguous. Michael Ward, as Jerry, fills each silence with a multitude of frowns, which detract from the delicacy of those Pinteresque moments of tension.
And yet, the performers still create an ambience of awkwardness, in which the characters show an inability to relate to one another. There is a lack of prolonged eye contact and a constant shifting of focus that evokes a sense of unease within the Unicorn’s intimate space. And although this production of Betrayal betrays itself as an amateur piece, it remains faithful to the play’s depiction of just how opaque and misleading human relationships can be.