Inside Betrayal - January 9
Posted by Amy Morton on 1/15/2007Today was the beginning of our third week of rehearsal. We’ve done a few runs of the show and are going back to scene work and then we’ll do more runs and scene work and go on like this for awhile. This is the first time I have done any Pinter and it is very much a… learning experience. Working with a text without the writer present is often about “decoding” what it all really means ie:
Emma: “Ever think of me?”
Jerry: “I don’t need to think of you”
Emma: “Oh?”
Jerry: “I don’t need to THINK of you”
Sort of a cryptic, mysterious, possibly vague. Well, with Pinter that’s every line and it’s DRIVING ME NUTS!
Add to that “nuttiness” the fact that the story is told, for the most part, backwards; so the usual actor’s experience of a logical emotional progression is tossed out the window and the most loaded scene is performed first. Needless to say, there’s a lot of frustration and fascination with this play. It feels so similar to Chekhov in the playing of it which means that there’s no way to muscle or fake your way through this story. You just have to sort of take out your heart and display it for all to see and forget about any fancy foot work. A very vulnerable position and, once again, I wonder what the hell I was thinking when I took this job.
By the way, you think I’m bitching now?…. Just wait.
January 16th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I can only imagine! Pinter’s impossibly vague, which is what makes it good, as well as bad, I guess. (I hope there’s less subtext than Chekov?)
It sounds like it’s going to be quite the experience. Best of luck!
January 18th, 2007 at 10:38 am
I just listened to Harold Pinter interviewed on NPR regarding his opposition to Tony Blair and his stance on the War in Iraq, along with his being presented the Legion D’Honneur. I think the fact that Steppenwolf is doing this production of Betrayal is so timely and I cannot wait to see the results. This is the item as presented by the BBC.
French PM honours Harold Pinter
Mr Pinter has spoken out strongly against the war in Iraq. The French prime minister has presented British playwright Harold Pinter with one of his country’s highest awards, the Legion D’Honneur. Dominique de Villepin gave the award at a ceremony at the French embassy in London, shortly after holding talks with Tony Blair.
Mr Pinter, awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely regarded as the UK’s greatest living playwright.
He is also well-known as an outspoken critic of US and UK foreign policy.
He has spoken out strongly against the war in Iraq and once labelled Mr Blair a “deluded idiot”.
At the ceremony, Mr de Villepin praised Mr Pinter’s poem American Football.
“With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence,” he said.
Mr Pinter in return praised France for its opposition to the war in Iraq.
His plays include The Birthday Party and Betrayal, and he has also written poetry and prose.
He was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in 2002, but continued to write poetry and speak out on political issues.
The BBC’s Lawrence Pollard says the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual.
Whether or not you agree with Pinter’s politics, Steppenwolf’s production of Betrayal should be spectacular.
On another note, I simply can’t imagine Amy Morton bitching at all!
January 18th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
On Pinter’s perception as an “impossibly vague” playwright- the greatest passage I found stated-
Because the past is unverifiable, all that viewers can know about a Pinter character is what they themselves discern. And this source or caliber of information often does not satisfy audiences familiar primarily with conventional dramatic exposition, especially since Pinter’s characters confuse viewers with contradiction. Consequently, audiences remain uncertain of motivations and are unable to verify what little they can surmise, a predicament that coincides with life outside the theater. How can we know, Esslin asked in ‘Pinter the Playwright,’ with “any semblance of certainty, what motivates our own wives, parents, our own children?” We cannot. And Pinter’s drama impedes all our attempts to know, despite (or perhaps because of) the anxiety that this raising of unanswerable questions creates.
Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006.
Some people go to the theatre for entertainment; that type of stimulation is lazy. After a Pinter piece, audiences leave the theatre thinking about the show they just experienced as ‘unfinished,’ but they have to fill in the blanks for themselves. Pinter requires an audience to continue the thought process not allowing it to end immediately upon conclusion of the show, just as looking at a Picasso for only a few minutes can lead to hours of discussion and self-reflection.