Betrayal
6 / 10
Director Jamie Lloyd's production, the play's third Broadway revival in 18 years, is capably acted but spare, gray and chilly; there is no set but two wooden chairs, a small folding table and a back wall that sometimes moves forward or backward. In each of the two-person scenes, the absent character lingers onstage like a gloomy ghost, sometimes nursing a drink. Everything seems intended to suggest the very English repression of great passions that the play never actually conveys. At the performance I attended, Hiddleston's icy facade cracked-during the scene in which he discovers his wife's adultery-to release a physical outpouring of fluid so profuse that it seemed like a magic trick, as though the actor had swiftly turned on and off a faucet that was hidden in his face. It was a strange and incongruous moment, and it provided a welcome burst of surprise in a production that is otherwise a chic and dreary affair.
