Betrayal Revival
1 hour and 30 minutes, with no intermission
Betrayal - 2013 Broadway History , Info & More
Ethel Barrymore Theatre (Broadway)
243 West 47th St. New York, NY
Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Rafe Spall star in Harold Pinter's Betrayal, directed by ten-time Tony Award-winner Mike Nichols. Betrayal is a strictly limited engagement, running 14 weeks only, through January 5, 2014 at the Barrymore Theatre (243 West 47th Street).
Betrayal originally premiered at London's National Theatre in 1978 and was immediately hailed as one of Pinter's masterworks, winning the 1979 Olivier Award for Best New Play. Emma (Rachel Weisz) is married to Robert (Daniel Craig), a publisher, but she has long had an affair with Jerry (Rafe Spall), a literary agent and Robert's best friend; as, in a brilliant device, time is regained, so the full complexity of their relationships comes to light.
Betrayal - 2013 - Broadway Cast
FEATURED REVIEWS FOR Betrayal
Betrayal – review
6 / 10
Daniel Craig shucks off his 007 persona to become Robert, a successful book publisher whose wife, Emma (Rachel Weisz) conducts a seven-year affair with Robert's friend Jerry (Rafe Spall), a literary agent. The compact, rugged Craig hasn't shrunken from years behind the camera: he projects himself fully and muscularly to the back stalls. Craig even enlivened vastly inferior material when last he was on the Great White Way, in the 2009 police melodrama A Steady Rain. And he's not emoting in a vacuum: Weisz and Spall have charisma to spare, not to mention keen sexual chemistry for their Kilburn flat trysts. So the design is lovely, the cast is appealing and the play itself, while of its time, is not essentially dated. It's simply that nobody gets the tone...I can't recommend this event to anyone who loves Pinter or Betrayal. If you don't care and you've got a few hundred burning a hole in your pocket, then have at it. But for goodness' sake, don't watch the 1983 movie starring Patricia Hodge, Jeremy Irons and Sir Ben Kingsley too soon after. It is an ideal transfer of play to film, and impeccably acted. If you were to screen it after seeing this glossy, empty revival, you'd feel cheated.
Threesome to Tantalize and Behold
9 / 10
A respectable stage actor before he became 007, [Craig] brings the same fierce intensity to talking that he does to zipping across moving trains and zapping supervillains. Not that such overt intensity is exactly what 'Betrayal' asks for, but never mind. As for Ms. Weisz, she looks smashing. And let me add that she, Mr. Craig and Mr. Spall seem to be having the kind of rowdy old time you associate with moldy British sex farces, though that's a genre in which I would never before have thought to include 'Betrayal...this is not a 'Betrayal' to leave you brooding and melancholy about our capacity to wound one another and to reach out, hopelessly and heroically, for a sustenance in others that they can never provide...this is a sexed-up 'Betrayal,' which is not the same as a sexy 'Betrayal.' All those contradictory, fleeting, haunting shades of thought that you expect to see playing on the features of Pinter's characters are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Robert, Emma and Jerry make up the rowdiest, most extroverted sexual triangle since Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman caterwauled their way through the ill-fated film 'Lucky Lady' in 1975.
Category
Betrayal History
Other Productions of Betrayal
| 1980 | Broadway |
Broadway |
| 2000 | Broadway |
Roundabout Revival Broadway |
| 2013 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
| 2019 | West End |
London Revival at Harold Pinter Theatre West End |
| 2019 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
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