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ARTS MARK LAWSON TEST OF TIME


Restagings in London’s West End of three major plays by writers born in the 1930s offer intriguing insight into how their scripts have both dated and matured


T


he tendency of a recession to encourage revivals rather than new plays is bad news for young playwrights but illuminating for


students of theatre: especially when a run of these restagings offers an impromptu seminar on a particular stretch of theatrical history. This is currently happening in London with


new productions of key plays by three signifi - cant English playwrights born in the 1930s: Betrayal by Harold Pinter (1930-2008) (Comedy Theatre), Butley by Simon Gray (1936-2008) (Duchess Theatre) and Chicken Soup with Barleyby the 79-year-old Sir Arnold Wesker (Royal Court Theatre). The writers are linked by factors other than chronology: Gray and Pinter, who directed the premiere of Butley, were close friends, while Pinter and Wesker had overlapping childhoods in the East End of London’s Jewish quarter, the sons respectively of a tailor and a cook. Betrayal was first staged at the National


Theatre in 1978, when the published text was dedicated to Gray. The initial reviews were brutal, with most critics lamenting that Pinter had turned to adultery among posh artistic types rather than the working-class territorial struggles and poetic ambiguities of his earlier work. In retrospect, at least some of this hos- tility was a prurient rebuke to the view that the writer was dramatising his then tabloid- scandalous relationship with Lady Antonia Fraser. Later biographies proved this to be wrong (its roots lay in an affair with Joan Bakewell). Tittle-tattle about the script’s inspir - ation became increasingly irrelevant as Betrayal established itself as the British play from the last quarter of the twentieth century that is most often revived: this latest West End version is at least the tenth I’ve seen. But it’s a measure of a great play that repet-


itive inspection continues to reveal new meanings and, under Ian Rickson’s direction, this playing easily passes that test. Betrayal’s 1978 detractors (most of whom later retracted) were convinced that Pinter was trying to dis- guise a banal plot – gallery curator Emma is married to publisher Robert but conducts a seven-year affair in a rented flat with literary agent Jerry – through a gimmicky structure: we watch the events in reverse order, from


1977 to 1968, from embarrassed ex-lovers meeting in a pub to the first guilty clinch at a party. In fact, not only is the form far more sophis- ticated than a simple flip of the calendar – time moves back and forward within the scheme – but the dialogue and psychology of each scene is riddled with cunning ambiguities and character points: a scene in which Jerry and Emma abandon their affair on the basis that they are never now free to meet in the afternoons is revealed, in an apparently casual half-line, to be happening in the afternoon. And recent productions, including this one, have rightly made much more of the glancing suggestion that Robert is violent to Emma, which went strangely unremarked in 1978. Kristin Scott Thomas also made me think, for the first time, that, in the opening scene, Emma is possibly trying to reignite the affair and, throughout, uses her film actress’ skill at facial revelation to give the most nuanced and painful rendition of this role I’ve ever seen. Ben Miles, dressed and coiffed to look startlingly like the 1970s Pinter, portrays a disturbing Robert, whose pugnaciousness clearly disguises vulnerability. Unfortunately, Douglas Henshall is a dull and mumbly Jerry whose performance would only make sense as a warning that not only may the grass not be greener on the other side of marriage but may turn out to be asphalt. The play’s great- ness, though, survives even this. The first major British production of Butley to be staged since the deaths of both its writer and first director is hobbled less by the tragic absence of Gray and Pinter than by another recent theatrical death: that of Alan Bates. He created the title role of the waspish, alcoholic, bisexual University of London lecturer Ben Butley who, in the course of one day in the office, is verbally violent to his estranged wife, his male lover, two colleagues and several undergraduates whom he stu- diously avoids teaching. Butley is a monster but Bates, whose 1971 performance survives in a film version, made him improbably charming. Dominic West, who leads Lindsay Posner’s


new production, is one of the best younger actors we have, with a quality of darkness that


Howard Pinter’s Betrayal: ‘It’s a measure of a great play that repetitive inspection continues to reveal new meanings’


has served him well in The Wire on TV and Calderon’s Life is a Dream on stage (and will presumably do so when he soon plays the serial killer Fred West on TV) but which underlines the deep unpleasantness of Butley, although Gray’s vicious one-liners still thrill. Dominic Cooke’s revival of Chicken Soup


with Barley at the Royal Court Theatre also remains in its original historical setting, as it has to do. Wesker’s play was already two- thirds a period piece: the three acts visit the Kahn family, an East End Jewish clan, in 1936, 1946, 1947, 1955 and 1956: chronicling the socialist or Communist beliefs of the matri- arch Sarah Kahn, brilliantly played by Samantha Spiro, from the Mosleyite fascist marches in 1930s London, through the Second World War to the crises of left-wing conscience caused by the Soviet invasions of the 1950s. This is a notably daring structure – how


many plays cover 20 years in two hours? – which sets the actors considerable challenges of rapid ageing and physical deterioriation, which Spiro and Danny Webb, as her husband Harry, achieve especially well. And, impres- sively, Wesker turns out to have provided enough expositional detail for the play to remain as comprehensible to audiences now as it did to the original playgoers who were only two years removed from front-page news of the invasions of Hungary Czechoslovakia.


Five years ago, most observers would have


ranked the hierarchy of these 1930s-born writers as Pinter, Gray, Wesker. On the evi- dence of these revivals, the author of Betrayal retains the first-place podium but the other two writers have swapped places. Seen in suc- cession, however, the plays indeed offer an intriguing course on the ways in which they have dated or matured.


2 July 2011 | THE TABLET | 25


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