PTC Offers Expert Rendition Of Harold
Pinter’s “Betrayal”
– “A powerful experience, both funny and
gut-wrenching – often simultaneously”
– “Under the direction of Gregg W.
Brevoort, four talented performers and an excellent backstage crew
succeed in making obvious why Pinter is one of the most important and
influential playwrights of the 20th century”
– “An unforgettable piece of theatre”
– “The cast couldn't be better”
– “If there's any justice in the world, PTC
will find itself with another success on its hands. You owe it to
yourself to see this classic of modern English drama”
The Maine Campus
Truth, consequences and straight up lies
Penobscot Theatre carries 'Betrayal' with first class and a simple set
–
“An altogether riveting performance that leaves the audience
questioning love, life and the pursuit of happiness”
– “Lies and their
consequences have never been portrayed so well”
– “Director Gregg
W. Brevoort uses three accomplished actors to capture the emotions
and feelings of the characters in the play”
– “All three actors
work with the confines of the clever script to create a powerful and
ultimately eye-opening look at the inside of a modern-day love affair”
– “The audience is …
completely enthralled in the saga”
the Bangor
Daily News Who’s Afraid Of ‘Betrayal’? Harold Pinter drama exposes marital mazes
– “Gregg W. Brevoort ...crafts a
production that does not back away from the questions the play raises
and knows better than to answer them. Brevoort is interested primarily
in the journeys of all three of the characters and never pushes the plot
toward indicting any one or two players as the responsible party. They
are all complicit ... more than that, however, they all love each
other.”
“It’s a stunning and
de-centering conclusion”
– “Brevoort’s production captures
much of the elegant convolution and confusion of this play [and is]
provocative on a number of levels”
– “So while the plot is sparse, the
internal life of this play is anything but”
– “Penobscot Theatre’s Betrayal
takes us back to where it all started, puts us on the journey of
hindsight, and let’s us peer into that unexpected and shattering first
time”
With Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, the title begs the obvious
question, “Who betrays whom?”
In rehearsal, we’ve discovered that the play deals with much more than
the lies and deceits of an adulterous triangle. Betrayal is
about the search for meaning in one’s life. Perhaps, ultimately, it is
self-betrayal that each character and each spectator is forced to examine.
Surprisingly, when Betrayal premiered back in 1978, it was not
universally well received in the critical press. Coming from a
playwright who had taken on human isolation, loss and suffering in such
plays as The Homecoming, The Caretaker and No Man’s Land
– work that had been compared to that of Samuel Beckett – Betrayal
was dismissed as trite and indulgent ... a tabloid story ripped from the
playwright’s own headlines.
As biographer Michael Billington explains in his definitive The Life
and Work of Harold Pinter – the playwright himself had carried on an
extra-marital affair that shared many of the details immortalized in
Betrayal: the seven year duration, the flat in Kilburn, the husband
having known all along, the revealing letter at the American Express office
in Venice.
Some critics cried that Pinter had served up a “high-class soap opera”
about “smart-set adultery.”
But autobiographical gossip is not the point – nor was Betrayal
written to serve as a cautionary tale on the dangers of adultery and marital
infidelity. Pinter succeeds in transcending the sordid details of his
own infidelities and has written a universal play that examines the hopes
and dreams which lie beneath the best (or worst) of our intrigues and
disguises. In Pinter’s world, Man betrays himself.
