Tom’s top of the range, even in cruise control
Why people buy high-performance cars just to sit in traffic jams will always defeat me. When do they get to put their foot down and really test the manufacturers’ specifications?
The same is true for Tom hiddleston in his impressive return to the West End stage in harold Pinter’s 1978 play.
hiddleston is a Lamborghini of an actor with shapely body work, a purring engine and, no doubt, a very plush interior. But I wasn’t sure we got to see his full range in Pinter’s story of a doomed love triangle told backwards.
Pinter was not the most flamboyant of dramatic writers. his dry, guarded characters are as famous for their silences as their cagey dialogue.
What’s more, here we find hiddleston playing a high-status stooge who discovers his wife has, for years, been having an affair with his best friend in a flat in Kilburn. Luckily, an actor’s greatness can also be measured by their ability to attract interest while parked at the kerb.
Tall, handsome Tom does that: ginger locks swept back to clear a path for his blue- eyed stare. hands shoved deep into pockets, hiddleston spends long periods of the play contemplating the middle distance. There is some eyebrow action
a la Roger Moore. A scattering of smiles suggests sad inner life. And there’s a heart- stopping moment of silent tears when he discovers his wife’s affair. But the actor never gets to let rip.
his oaky voice snaps only occasionally under tension, and we get strangulated barks that sound like Nobel Laureate Pinter himself. hiddleston is at his most animated when stabbing a fork into a piece of melon while confronting his friend over a boozy lunch. Never less than very watchable, that is star quality.
ZAWE ASHTON is fascinating as Emma. she is a lithe, wriggling, flirtatious enigma torn between two men who give off little more than pheromones.
Charlie Cox is an enormously sympathetic actor but here, as her lover, he is just as warily understated as hiddleston.
The play is now well into middle age. The liquid lunch involving two bottles of Corvo may be a matter of nostalgia but, when hiddleston’s Robert blithely admits to domestic violence, it’s a grim reminder that this was an era when it was possible to say such things without censure.
Even so, Jamie Lloyd’s taut production seeks to make the action seem hip, with soutra Gilmour’s spartan set made up of a white floor and three walls of pinkish-granite.
Pinter describes a rarified world, charting the small agonies of the seventies metropolitan bubble. It’s also a semi-autobiographical account of his seven-year affair with journalist and broadcaster Joan Bakewell in the sixties.
The trouble is that his characters exist in a virtual moral vacuum where marriage is a matter of convenience. having a child walk on towards the end helps raise the stakes, and Ben and Max Ringham’s dreamy sound design softens the edges.
But, for all such tweaks, the play remains an emotional car park full of shiny limos.
A VERSION of this review appeared in yesterday’s paper.
Betrayal (Harold Pinter Theatre) Verdict: Fine actors flatter stilted play