He loves her, she loves him, but he's married to somebody else - and actually, so is she. Playing now at the Devanaughn Theatre, Harold Pinter's well-known tale of the love triangle, "Betrayal," shows how three really can be company when the three are a husband, a wife and their "best man."
Pinter, a Nobel laureate, built this play backwards, setting the scene in the present, then two years earlier, then one year earlier than that, and so on. Detailing the affair of Emma (Rose Carlson) and Jerry (Mark Hessler), the wife and best friend of the deceived husband Robert (Rob O'Dwyer), the story opens on the demise of Emma and Robert's marriage two years after Emma and Jerry's affair has ended. The ruin of both romantic relationships is clear, while the friendship of the men is thrown into question, as it has seemingly survived.
To begin, Emma and Jerry uneasily reunite in a pub, attempting to behave well yet falling into recriminations as Emma tells Jerry that her marriage to his best friend has failed and that she has told her husband about their affair after having learned of her husband's numerous affairs. The actors strike a perfect pitch. Hessler is flippant while Carlson is matter-of-fact, and the audience is introduced to the latest, perhaps most poignant betrayal: that of Emma's confession to her husband, Jerry's best friend.
In the next scene, when it's clear that Robert has known for far longer than Jerry could even imagine, what one would expect to be a messy altercation is just two old friends visiting. Hessler's shock as he portrays his character's true ignorance of his relationship with his best friend is tragic, yet somehow he easily gulps it down as he gulps his brandy. These scenes set the distant tone for the rest of the play, which reveals a little more about Emma and Jerry's relationship but is less interesting because of the affair's clich?©d development.
The detachment continues, however - even the all-important scene that reveals how Robert finds out about his wife's affair with his best friend becomes anti-climactic in its aloof delivery and urbanity. The strong emotion that occasionally builds slowly diffuses through the cold, stilted relations among the characters. Ultimately the audience is rewarded by the strangely uplifting final scene, which explains how it all began.
Robert handles his wife's affair with a dry, bemused resignation, not even bothering to confront his best friend. Emma takes on each new twist with a brittle secretiveness, as she comes to lie not only to her husband, but to her lover as well.
Carlson holds it all together, as she is the precarious connection between the two men, and her strength and self-awareness give her somewhat unlikable character a realistic edge.
Inane words and empty Briticisms fill the silences of this drama, but they're ultimately unimportant. The life in Pinter's dialogue is from the silences: the gaps, halts, and starts. Hessler makes good use of this feature, and at times delivers his lines with spot-on comic timing, as his character spends most of the play unaware of the subtext that lurks behind every moment with his lover and his best friend.
Certain lines vividly capture the conflict in the play; in the final scene, as Emma attempts to deny Jerry's initial advance, she reminds him that he was her husband's best man in their wedding. Jerry replies, "Your best man." It sums up the complex relationship of the three, a web that perhaps cut short Emma and Robert's marriage - or perhaps prolonged it.
O'Dwyer gives a solid interpretation of the charmingly brutish man's man and alpha male, giving Robert, the seemingly cuckolded husband, a certain dignity. Robert is not so bothered by his wife's affair; sheepishly, yet cuttingly, he remarks that he's always liked Jerry more than his wife, anyway.
Betrayal infuses every moment of the play; the Devanaughn's production makes the audience wonder just who was betrayed. Each actor takes his or her respective character's personalities in a less emotional, more cynical direction.
While one may expect to see the strong feelings requisite to betrayals manifest themselves forcefully, this sadder, gentler execution of Pinter's tale leaves the audience wondering what tied these three together in the first place. No one has ever betrayed anyone quite so politely.
