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ivyficI watched Betrayal on Broadway last night.
I'd initially given it a miss because it's Pinter (and seriously, fuck Pinter). But one of the advantages of working in Times Square is proximity to the TKTS booth, and what I most enjoy in live theater is ACT-ING, so a three-person show starring Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Cox, and Zawe Ashton was irresistible, even if it was fucking Pinter.
And ACT-ING it was. It was a very un-Pintery play, by which I mean it had a plot and character arcs (and consistent characters) and, while in reverse chronology, the timeline was very easy to follow. As I texted Mithras after, it's more like Albee, without the dead babies.
I now find myself wishing it had a fandom. Which it does not. It's a forty-year-old Pinter play. But I really wish there was fic, at least of this cast.
Things:
- This play is definitely ACT-ING. There is nothing particularly new about it, more like watching racehorses get to run flat out. Particularly with stars of mainstream blockbusters, it's nice to be able to see them stretch all their acting muscles.
- The staging is NOT SUBTLE. All three are on stage the whole time, so you'll have scenes between the two men, where they are sitting so far apart on the stage you have to look back and forth like a tennis match, and the wife is standing between them at the back of the stage. Most of the show, the people in the scene together would be far apart, sometimes with darkness in between them. It is like they are UNABLE TO CONNECT EMOTIONALLY or something.
- It took about two sentences of Cox speaking to get used to his British (actual) accent. When he first opened his mouth, it was like whiplash.
- Hiddleston's hair (which is on the posters) looks fantastic from the front and ludicrous from the back. He's got so much product in it, it looks like it was stuck in the middle of a windstorm.
- You see Hiddleston's abs for a minute, and this is far from what I was supposed to be paying attention to in the scene, but HOLY SHIT. He is ripped. We need more shirtless Loki. Get on that, Marvel.
- I have never seen Zawe Ashton, before, but she was fantastic. Reading about this play, it seems like in many productions the wife is sort of a prop in the conflict, but definitely not here.
The plot of the play is that Emma (Ashton), is married to Robert (Hiddleston) but has had an affair for seven years with Jerry (Cox). While I'm not sure how much you can spoil something that runs in reverse chronology, I'm going to put the rest under a cut.
The play opens with Emma and Jerry having drinks for the first time since their affair ended two years previously. Ashton plays Emma as the sort of person who smiles (and flirts) when she is miserable, and Cox's Jerry is the sort of person who is ENTIRELY OBLIVIOUS to almost everything. He talks for awhile about how great it was, and how no one ever suspected anything (spoiler, he's wrong about that). And he's not even jealous that she's taken a new lover, just irritated that people are taking about him, but never talked about Jerry.
So they have drinks and reminisce until Emma reveals the reason she called is that she found out last night that Robert has had a string of affairs, and her marriage is over.
Oh, and she told Robert about her affair with Jerry.
Next scene, Jerry has called Robert over in an absolute panic to have it out about the revelation that he'd had an affair with Robert's wife. Robert doesn't give a shit. Because he found out four years ago.
So this is what I found so compelling about these performances--in the first couple scenes with Robert, he is cold and cutting. And I started to think--oh, Robert isn't really Jerry's friend, he just likes fucking with him. There are scenes of vapid small talk, where Robert is just feeding out rope to Jerry to watch him hang himself.
But then you roll back to when Robert found out about the affair. And that scene is crushing to watch. There is no yelling in this production at all. You just watch Robert and Emma quietly implode next to each other (and I was close enough to see the tears in his eyes). And you realize that the cold, cutting person we've been watching is what Robert became.
Because he found out about his wife having an affair with his best friend. And then stayed with his wife, and kept having lunch and going to the pub with his best friend, while they continued to have an affair. And he never even told Jerry that he knew. It's like the Smallville fandom trope--that Lex figured out about Clark a long time ago, and has just become more twisted and bitter as he watches Clark continue to play out his obvious lie. Same thing here.
It isn't that Robert worked through his emotions and became okay with it. This is pure masochism. He just kept playing the facade to see how long these people, the two most important relationships in his life, would continue to betray him.
Then there's Jerry. After Robert has found out, you get a pair of scenes with Jerry, first with Emma, then with Robert. In the first, Emma is clearly upset about something and very worried about Jerry having lunch with her husband, but she doesn't tell Jerry what has upset her, and he seems entirely content to pretend like nothing's wrong.
Then you get Robert and Jerry going to lunch together, where Hiddleston plays Robert as a man who hasn't yet decided if he's going to confront Jerry. So he just gets them both incredibly drunk and aggressively talks about nonsense. And Jerry, who has now heard two contradictory versions of Robert and Emma's trip to Italy from the two of them, and who can't possibly miss that Robert is very upset, is so preoccupied with not letting slip about his affair, that he can't put together that maybe something is wrong with Robert and Emma's marriage. And maybe the thing that is wrong is the incredibly obvious thing.
Jerry is so guileless, it's like the only way he can keep from revealing the affair is to pretend like he doesn't know what's going on, ever. He should have been able to tell that something happened between Emma and Robert, but because he has to keep those two things separate to keep the lie going, he won't integrate the information enough to figure out what is blindingly obvious.
So then I realize that what you are watching is a friendship between two men, where Jerry, as soon as he started the affair, made himself completely emotionally unavailable in all his relationships, because all he's focussed on in any interaction, is keeping his secret. He has no room to even think about other people. And Robert, when he finds out, and in the masterful dinner scene where he doesn't quite confront Jerry, very baldly shows his vulnerability, that he is desperately unhappy, and reaches out for Jerry's support--and gets nothing.
And then what it would be like to continue the facade of this friendship and his marriage when he knows that neither of these people care about him at all. Of course by the end (start of the play), he is a cold and manipulative person.
So what I'm saying is, Hiddleston plays a brilliant reverse character arc that went unexpected places despite the fact that the plot, as it is in reverse order, is entirely predictable. And Cox brilliantly played a self-centered shallow man, allowing both Hiddleston and Ashton to show off the depth and subtlety of their characters.
Very much recommended, especially if you can be close to the stage.
I'd initially given it a miss because it's Pinter (and seriously, fuck Pinter). But one of the advantages of working in Times Square is proximity to the TKTS booth, and what I most enjoy in live theater is ACT-ING, so a three-person show starring Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Cox, and Zawe Ashton was irresistible, even if it was fucking Pinter.
And ACT-ING it was. It was a very un-Pintery play, by which I mean it had a plot and character arcs (and consistent characters) and, while in reverse chronology, the timeline was very easy to follow. As I texted Mithras after, it's more like Albee, without the dead babies.
I now find myself wishing it had a fandom. Which it does not. It's a forty-year-old Pinter play. But I really wish there was fic, at least of this cast.
Things:
- This play is definitely ACT-ING. There is nothing particularly new about it, more like watching racehorses get to run flat out. Particularly with stars of mainstream blockbusters, it's nice to be able to see them stretch all their acting muscles.
- The staging is NOT SUBTLE. All three are on stage the whole time, so you'll have scenes between the two men, where they are sitting so far apart on the stage you have to look back and forth like a tennis match, and the wife is standing between them at the back of the stage. Most of the show, the people in the scene together would be far apart, sometimes with darkness in between them. It is like they are UNABLE TO CONNECT EMOTIONALLY or something.
- It took about two sentences of Cox speaking to get used to his British (actual) accent. When he first opened his mouth, it was like whiplash.
- Hiddleston's hair (which is on the posters) looks fantastic from the front and ludicrous from the back. He's got so much product in it, it looks like it was stuck in the middle of a windstorm.
- You see Hiddleston's abs for a minute, and this is far from what I was supposed to be paying attention to in the scene, but HOLY SHIT. He is ripped. We need more shirtless Loki. Get on that, Marvel.
- I have never seen Zawe Ashton, before, but she was fantastic. Reading about this play, it seems like in many productions the wife is sort of a prop in the conflict, but definitely not here.
The plot of the play is that Emma (Ashton), is married to Robert (Hiddleston) but has had an affair for seven years with Jerry (Cox). While I'm not sure how much you can spoil something that runs in reverse chronology, I'm going to put the rest under a cut.
The play opens with Emma and Jerry having drinks for the first time since their affair ended two years previously. Ashton plays Emma as the sort of person who smiles (and flirts) when she is miserable, and Cox's Jerry is the sort of person who is ENTIRELY OBLIVIOUS to almost everything. He talks for awhile about how great it was, and how no one ever suspected anything (spoiler, he's wrong about that). And he's not even jealous that she's taken a new lover, just irritated that people are taking about him, but never talked about Jerry.
So they have drinks and reminisce until Emma reveals the reason she called is that she found out last night that Robert has had a string of affairs, and her marriage is over.
Oh, and she told Robert about her affair with Jerry.
Next scene, Jerry has called Robert over in an absolute panic to have it out about the revelation that he'd had an affair with Robert's wife. Robert doesn't give a shit. Because he found out four years ago.
So this is what I found so compelling about these performances--in the first couple scenes with Robert, he is cold and cutting. And I started to think--oh, Robert isn't really Jerry's friend, he just likes fucking with him. There are scenes of vapid small talk, where Robert is just feeding out rope to Jerry to watch him hang himself.
But then you roll back to when Robert found out about the affair. And that scene is crushing to watch. There is no yelling in this production at all. You just watch Robert and Emma quietly implode next to each other (and I was close enough to see the tears in his eyes). And you realize that the cold, cutting person we've been watching is what Robert became.
Because he found out about his wife having an affair with his best friend. And then stayed with his wife, and kept having lunch and going to the pub with his best friend, while they continued to have an affair. And he never even told Jerry that he knew. It's like the Smallville fandom trope--that Lex figured out about Clark a long time ago, and has just become more twisted and bitter as he watches Clark continue to play out his obvious lie. Same thing here.
It isn't that Robert worked through his emotions and became okay with it. This is pure masochism. He just kept playing the facade to see how long these people, the two most important relationships in his life, would continue to betray him.
Then there's Jerry. After Robert has found out, you get a pair of scenes with Jerry, first with Emma, then with Robert. In the first, Emma is clearly upset about something and very worried about Jerry having lunch with her husband, but she doesn't tell Jerry what has upset her, and he seems entirely content to pretend like nothing's wrong.
Then you get Robert and Jerry going to lunch together, where Hiddleston plays Robert as a man who hasn't yet decided if he's going to confront Jerry. So he just gets them both incredibly drunk and aggressively talks about nonsense. And Jerry, who has now heard two contradictory versions of Robert and Emma's trip to Italy from the two of them, and who can't possibly miss that Robert is very upset, is so preoccupied with not letting slip about his affair, that he can't put together that maybe something is wrong with Robert and Emma's marriage. And maybe the thing that is wrong is the incredibly obvious thing.
Jerry is so guileless, it's like the only way he can keep from revealing the affair is to pretend like he doesn't know what's going on, ever. He should have been able to tell that something happened between Emma and Robert, but because he has to keep those two things separate to keep the lie going, he won't integrate the information enough to figure out what is blindingly obvious.
So then I realize that what you are watching is a friendship between two men, where Jerry, as soon as he started the affair, made himself completely emotionally unavailable in all his relationships, because all he's focussed on in any interaction, is keeping his secret. He has no room to even think about other people. And Robert, when he finds out, and in the masterful dinner scene where he doesn't quite confront Jerry, very baldly shows his vulnerability, that he is desperately unhappy, and reaches out for Jerry's support--and gets nothing.
And then what it would be like to continue the facade of this friendship and his marriage when he knows that neither of these people care about him at all. Of course by the end (start of the play), he is a cold and manipulative person.
So what I'm saying is, Hiddleston plays a brilliant reverse character arc that went unexpected places despite the fact that the plot, as it is in reverse order, is entirely predictable. And Cox brilliantly played a self-centered shallow man, allowing both Hiddleston and Ashton to show off the depth and subtlety of their characters.
Very much recommended, especially if you can be close to the stage.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-05 05:00 pm (UTC)Want to have dinner sometime soon, anyway? :)