The Night Manager gives a hypnotic stage performance
Theatre Betrayal Harold Pinter Theatre ★★★★★
Prepare for a new wave of Hiddleston-mania. Tom Hiddleston is back on stage, bringing Jamie Lloyd’s six-month salute to Harold Pinter at the West End theatre that bears his name to an immensely satisfying climax
– one that not only reconfirms
Betrayal as a modern masterpiece, but reassures us that Hiddleston has got the theatrical acting chops to head up there among the greats.
He stars as Robert – a publisher whose art gallery-managing wife, Emma, conducts an affair with his married best friend Jerry (a literary agent) for some considerable time without his knowledge, but then for some considerable time with his strange complicity (with Jerry kept unaware of the fact until the bitter end, a source of much hypocritical indignation on his part).
His performance doesn’t have the macho sweat and gristle of his Coriolanus, seen at the Donmar in 2013. Nor superficially does it rank as a piece of “event theatre” of the order of his Rada Hamlet two years ago. Nor does it feature the nudity that helped make his turn in the 2016 BBC television series The Night Manager a national talking point.
But in common with all his best work he displays a hypnotic sensitivity. Such is his physical and vocal control, that no matter how light the look or line, or indeed how loaded, everything registers. I had worried that the actor, 38, might come across as too wellspoken, too restrained, but he doesn’t merely suggest the noxious, torturing impact of that title word, Betrayal, he seems to carry it in his bloodstream.
Famously working backwards in chronology – from a forlorn pub meeting in 1977 to the originating moment of infidelity in a drunken bedroom encounter amid a 1968 party, like some shattered vase being put back together – Betrayal was the play that momentarily saw the critics ceasing to pander to Pinter. The playwright’s biographer, Michael Billington – who teased out the crucial admission that the work’s affair was inspired by Pinter’s own with Joan Bakewell, while he was married to Vivien Merchant – scoffed at the bourgeois “high-class soap opera” at the 1978 National premiere.
Lloyd takes pains to emphasise the piece’s radical daring – its exposure of inmost agonies, however meticulously veiled by English understatement and an affectation of insouciance. He places the actors – the love triangle completed by Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox – in stylish but simple modern dress, with the odd retro hint.
It’s the opposite of obvious West End glamour – a mottled-marbled surround of lightly coloured wall and two wooden chairs between the three actors which help, when fixed in different positions, to conjure contrasts in physical proximity and emotional distance. With all three bodies on stage continuously, whoever is absent appears to haunt and even eavesdrop on what’s being said behind their back. The abstraction is a means of releasing the exchanges from straightforward naturalism and it also allows the actors to fill the space with their own brooding presences.
Forced on the alert for telltale signs as events rewind, we notice everything as if under a magnifying glass: the way Hiddleston lets his wedding ring agitatedly tap against a tumbler, the way he elongates intent stares from something innocuous to something akin to a dagger drawn, the tears that brim as he discovers the length of the betrayal. Striking, ardent, confident, Ashton’s Emma could do with more enigma and less underlined brittleness but catches the character’s ache and discontent well, while Cox acquits himself superbly as the down-to-earth best mate who behaves like a rotter, with cat-that-got-the-cream smiles and an awful sheepishness as it dawns on him that the others have played him for a fool. Funny, sharp, oddly nasty, and memorably anguished, Lloyd’s Betrayal is fully faithful to a theatrical landmark.