Stage Review : ‘Betrayal’ in Gaslamp’s Pinter Offering Isn’t of the Audience

If people could know the end of a love affair before they began one, would they ever have the heart to start?

That is the question so elegantly and eloquently posed by Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” which starts two years after an adulterous affair ends and moves nine years back to the couple’s first heady embrace.

If told as an afternoon soap, this story of a husband, wife and the wife’s married lover (who also happens to be the husband’s best friend) would be done at the top of the actors’ lungs, probably ending with a teary, reckless drive skirting a jagged cliff and a tune-in-next-week send-off. In Pinter, however, there are these ... pauses and searching looks and then, the slow, pained averting of eyes.

Because so much of the story is told between--or as a counterpoint to--the words, Pinter’s play requires an exceptional maturity of acting skills.

Happily, director Will Simpson has assembled an enviable ring of local talent for the current production, playing through July 2 at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre.

Ron Richards plays the husband, Robert, with an intensity that shimmers more brightly for being kept under the determined wrap of civilized restraint. As Emma, Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds projects pained shadows beneath the wife’s cool, elegant demeanor. Douglas Roberts portrays Jerry as a tall, confused giant who seems endlessly uncertain and bewildered as the friend who never really has a clue as to what made him fall so passionately in love with Emma and then as to what went wrong.

Under Simpson’s direction, the three do not so much move as quietly weave emotional webs around each other. Then, as Emma and Jerry’s lie to Robert leads to the lies of Emma to Jerry, these threads are pulled away to reveal layers of betrayal under the central one at issue. The complications twist again when a hurt Robert tells Emma that he always liked Jerry more than he liked her, which begs the question of whether the affair came about not despite of the friendship between the men but because of Emma’s envy or a desire on Jerry’s part to get closer to his friend.

The tale comes across all the more darkly in contrast to the lover’s flitting wistful memory of a “Paradise Lost”-- the time before the betrayal when a still-innocent Jerry threw Robert and Emma’s baby daughter, Charlotte, up in the air and caught her and they all laughed.

The starkness of “Betrayal” is well served by Robert Earl’s bare-bones set: four sets of shelves with drinks, books, knickknacks and perfume bottles--the borders of these people’s lives. Less successful is the sound design by John Hauser, a distracting mishmash of styles between the scenes. The more successful selections were the subtle pastoral ones; in contrast, the use of discordant brasses before the scenes of conflict undercuts the very subtlety of Pinter’s delivery. Compounding the melodramatic tones were the evidently unstoppable sounds of the street, with dogs barking outside like veritable hounds from hell.

Timing is everything in this play, an understanding that is underlined by Matthew Cubitto’s lighting, which softens nicely on the actors’ features as the play moves back in time and by Ingrid Helton’s smartly chosen costumes, which similarly track the years--with one quibble. As Emma grows younger, Helton cleverly dresses her in lighter costumes, even loosening the style of her hair. Then after moving from deep green to sky blue to pastels, she ends the scene of innocence with a dim color rather than a clear, clean bright one.

When it comes to timing, however, it is Pinter himself who sets the standard. “I can’t believe that this has ever happened before,” super salesman Jerry says as he is wooing Emma at the very beginning of their affair. “This is the only thing that has ever happened.” It is only the exact, brilliant placement of these lines, near the end of the play, that make them ring as hollowly as an aching black hole.

“BETRAYAL”

By Harold Pinter. Director, Will Simpson. Set, Robert Earl. Lighting, Matthew Cubitto. Sound, John Hauser. Costumes, Ingrid Helton. Stage manager, Cynthia M. Fraley. With Douglas Roberts, Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds, Ron Richards and David Flint. At 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, with Sunday matinees at 2, through July 2. At the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company, 444 4th Ave., San Diego.