Here And Now

A revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” and anti-vaxxers in “Eureka Day.”

- Vinson Cunningham

In many great dramatic texts, talk pins us to specifics. Tics of speech sprout up, as if organically, from the political contingencies and the geographical facts that give rise to character. A wonderful feature of the theatre is that, from one production of a work to the next, those verbal bursts can attach to new applications, sending their signals off to meet new satellites of place and time. The word “revival” becomes literal: let’s make this thing live again, but differently.

Yet in the latest revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” written in 1978 and now on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, the director, Jamie Lloyd, declines this opportunity, to disorienting effect. Instead of setting Pinter’s love triangle-told-backwards amid freshly suggestive surroundings, Lloyd strips the production bare, leaving the play to speak in a near-vacuum, a head without a body.

Emma (Zawe Ashton) and Jerry (Charlie Cox) have carried on an affair for seven years; Robert (Tom Hiddleston), Emma’s husband and Jerry’s good friend, hasn’t been as much in the dark as Jerry thinks. The play unshrouds itself in bars and restaurants, at Emma and Robert’s house, and at the “home” to which Jerry and Emma retreat on furtive afternoons. Lloyd shrugs these locations loose, and instead places a marbled white wall behind his players and gives them the barest props. The actors move around a few wooden chairs. A folding table set lovingly in the secret apartment becomes, in the next scene, a two-top for a boozily charged, cryptically combative lunch between Jerry and Robert. The whole thing might be happening in a back hallway of a museum.