Liev met up with some of us after his performance of Betrayal. Here is a sampling of some of the photos. I have to admit I am disappointed that I was so busy taking pictures for everyone else that I did not get one of myself and Liev.

Brenne and Liev / Cami and Liev

 
Liev and Chicken / Melissa and Liev

Melissa, Marie, Angie and Brenne / Liev, Marie and Chicken

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Juliette Binoche (Emma) and Liev Schreiber (Jerry)
in Harold Pinter's Betrayal
Photo from Nov. 13 New York Magazine
scanned by Melissa Byers

Juliette Binoche (Emma) and Liev Schreiber (Jerry)
in Harold Pinter's Betrayal
Photo from Nov. 14 Playbill Online
Photo by Joan Marcus

Liev Schreiber (Jerry)
in Harold Pinter's Betrayal
Photo from Theatre.com

Liev Schreiber (Jerry)
in Harold Pinter's Betrayal

Liev Schreiber and John Slattery
in Harold Pinter's Betrayal
Photo by Joan Marcus

Betrayal: a review in progress

The play was well-done; I am in love with the structure of time and space it used. I thought the actors all had their timing and groove *almost* down pat. It rather reminded me of a sit-com where you know the ensemble actors will get their groove together very, very soon and be a great team..., but not quite yet. Would love to see it again in about a month to observe how much that timing has changed and tightened. It admit this is a potential disadvantage to seeing any show in its preview period, when the show is still being tested and twisted to find the best possible mode.

 I *do* think that such an intimate play would have been better suited for a smaller theater, perhaps even in the round. Liev, Juliette and John all did fine in form and accent and without being biased I can actually say that Liev looked to have an easier time of it, though. He seemed more at ease, more natural. I still hold, though, that in time they will all be buzzing along without a glitch. I would liked to have seen the characters standing a little closer to one another in some of the scenes...and I think Juliette was directed to play her character too cold.

As minimalist as the scenery was, I was bowled over by its simple richness. Kudos to the lighting designer!

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The production of Harold Pinterıs Betrayal at the American Airlines Theater is one that American audiences, raised on confessional television where everyday people scream out their pain and anger for all the world to see, may find hard to believe at first.  The story revolves around three people caught not just a triangle but in a cat's cradle of friendship, love and lies. Through it all, they keep that proverbial British "stiff upper lip,"  as they attempt to remain not just civil but downright friendly.

The story begins at the end, with Emma (Juliette Binoche) having a friendly drink with Jerry (Liev Schreiber) as she tells him of the ending of her marriage to Robert (John Slattery).  It seems that when she felt the need to tell someone, the first person she thought to tell is her former lover, who also happens to be her husbandıs best friend.  The story does not unfold, but rather folds in upon itself as it moves back in time, ending at the very beginning of Emmaıs affair with Jerry.  Each scene contains revelations that leave the audience continually re-evaluating what theyıve just seen in the preceding piece of the puzzle.  

Probably the most difficult element to believe in the characters is their matter-of-fact attitude, but therein lies the true measure of the actors.  One of Pinterıs recurring themes is the way in which people try to hide from their own emotions.  This may be a particularly British trait, or at least one which Americans seem to have thrown to the winds that blew in Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake and their ilk.  The genius here is that the actors, while saying their lines in that very clipped accent, still manage to convey the inferno roiling beneath.  It shows in the way Binoche and Schreiber dance around their past in the opening scene, and the slight crack in Slatteryıs voice as he stoically accepts his wifeıs confession of her affair with his best friend.  

Rob Howellıs set and David Weinerıs lighting give the actors plenty of room to maneuver.  The set is basically a ³white box,² with ever changing doors, windows, backdrops and lighting to suggest different times and places.  The turntable on which the actors play allows them to move into and out of scenes with a surreal, almost balletic grace.  In place of a curtain, a screen comes in on which to project the time into which we move, set to music that suggests the movements of a symphony.  The music, somewhat Baroque in character, adds to the layers of civility laid over the turmoil going on in the movements.  The simplicity of the set allows the actors to fill the space with their emotion, or apparent lack thereof.  And these actors do fill the space, although at some moments it might have been nice to have less space between characters so that their connection showed more clearly.  Perhaps my favorite moment comes at the very end when Jerry and Emma are caught in a shaft of light, alone on the brink of the disaster their lives will become.   

I cannot imagine three more capable actors for these roles.  Juliette Binoche has a luminous quality that makes it easy to see why these men would love her, even when she seems so cold.  She is particularly appealing in the early scenes (in "real" chronology - not in order of the play) when she and Jerry are first in love.  As Robert, John Slattery is the perfect English gentleman, gruff, sportsmanlike, and utterly sanguine about his wife's affair.  However, he does show some cracks in the armor, the slight trembling of the voice, the shaking of the hand that pours the drinks.  Because he is so incapable of showing his heartbreak, the audienceıs heart breaks for him.  Liev's Jerry is a man trying desperately to keep himself together while obviously falling apart.  The audience is never sure if he is more distraught over losing his lover or his best friend, perhaps because Jerry isn't sure.  Like the others, he is trying not to show his vulnerability, but that vulnerability is painfully apparent - to everyone but himself.  

All the actors handle the British accents well, Liev a bit better than the others.  Having seen the show early in the preview period, it was apparent that the actors hadn't worked together long, since they didn't seem to have each other's rhythms down quite yet. The timing in a few moments wasnıt quite right, but it was easy to see that they had the chemistry to make it work with just a little more time together.  

Director David Leveaux has managed to pull out a number of comedic moments, a necessity to leaven the dark subject matter, and to help the audience to like and sympathize with the characters.  

Betrayal  is a worthy entry into this Broadway season and can only enhance the Roundabout Theater Companyıs already stellar reputation.  
   

Cherub's Review

Betrayal

When Angie asked us all to contribute, I told her that I would not.  At the time, I felt uneasy about voicing my opinion, as I was somewhat disappointed.  Perhaps I have misinterpreted the play, substituting my own imagination for something that this play was not intended to be.  My emotions and imagination sometimes run off the deep-end, somewhat over dramatic, some might say.  Mr. Schreiber’s theater performance last year, as Hamlet, had me shaking!  He was the finest Hamlet that I had ever seen.  I was mesmerized by his performance.  I decided that I would never see a film production of Shakespeare again. It would be live stage or nothing.

I have given this production a lot of thought, hoping to find a reason to change my opinion.      However, I still come back to the same thing, that the play, for my taste, was too sterile.  The opening scene should have been the beginning of a thawing out process, which should have continued throughout the play.  The final scene should have sizzled.

Why?  Passion is what brought Emma & Jerry together.  There was nothing compelling in their behavior as to why they were risking their marriages, families, friendships, and businesses to carry on their long affair.   I thought of how Taylor and Burton may have portrayed Emma and Jerry. 

I asked myself, what made that yellow apron so to appealing to Jerry?  What should have been under that apron?  Probably, not much.  Why weren’t his hands all over her, groping at that apron? 

One of the middle scenes in which Jerry and Emma “roll” on the bed was clumsy.  This is where subtlety would have gone a lot further.  

Jerry and Emma’s encounter in the last scene should have been filled with deep emotion.  Here, Jerry confesses his long harbored love and devotion to Emma.  Where was the drama?  She hardly reacted.  Why didn’t he grab her, or drop to his knees, confessing his love?  Jerry has kept his desires hidden for a very long time, and now that he has finally decided to take a risk, and make his confession, and it falls flat.  When Robert enters the bedroom, there was no shock displayed by either Emma or Jerry.   The last scene was too open-ended.  It should have been the scene that linked the rest of the play, with a display of ensuing passion.

By Ben Williams

Everything that matters goes unsaid in this archetypically British take on a love triangle. Less grand passion than cunning calculation, "Betrayal"'s pleasures derive from its dryly humorous depiction of the way conversational banalities are used to evade the truth, and from the challenge of figuring out who knew what when. The plot begins at the end and works backward; as it unfolds, a quietly bleak picture of everyday deceit emerges.

Juliette Binoche and Liev Schrieber, the starry points at the triangle's base, don't quite balance each other out. Schreiber nails down Jerry, an affably thoughtless publisher who's less selfish than self-oblivious. While Binoche is more emotionally suggestive as the wife of Jerry's best friend, she never quite catches hold of her character. But then, "Betrayal" is really about the relationship between Jerry and the cuckolded husband (John Slattery, who conveys the grouchier aspects of a stiff upper lip with much charm), who share most of what passes for intimacy here.

Betrayal

By William Stevenson

The play is famous for its unusual structure, since it travels back in time. Thus it begins with the meeting of wife and mother Emma (Juliette Binoche) and book agent Jerry (Liev Schreiber) in a London pub. It turns out they had a seven-year affair that ended two years earlier. As the play progresses, or heads deeper into the past, rather, Pinter explores the fallout of the affair, the affair itself, and finally the origin of the affair.

As important as the infidelity itself is the question of who knew what when and whether the characters remember events accurately. In Pinter's sly world, there is more than one kind of betrayal. So when Emma's husband, book publisher Robert (John Slattery), keeps his knowledge of the affair a secret, that too is a kind of betrayal since he and Jerry are best friends. As Pinter moves further back, the relationship between the three main characters continues to evolve, subtly shifting as we learn more about the infidelity and its repercussions.

It's one of Pinter's best and most accessible plays, and director David Leveaux (who also directed this year's superb revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing) brings out every nuance. Under his direction, the actors make every pause as meaningful as the dialogue. Like Pinter's writing, his direction is crisp, clear, and economical.

Reinforcing the simplicity of his conception is Rob Howell's stark white set, which adapts easily to become different apartments, restaurants, and a Venice hotel room. Even more striking is David Weiner's gorgeous lighting: it brings the characters into sharp (or soft) focus while creating evocative atmosphere.

Weiner's most memorable image comes at the end, when Binoche stands in a dark bedroom in a red dress, on the brink of starting an affair. The image stays with you, in part because Binoche looks so ravishing in that dress. You can see why a man would risk a friendship by falling in love with her.

Binoche, who won an Oscar for The English Patient, does much more than just look good, however. She shows her range as she varies Emma's moods from scene to scene. (And, interestingly, her French accent can be heard whenever she gets emotional.)

The actress also has excellent chemistry with Schreiber. When their affair is in full bloom, they certainly look every bit the happy couple in their rented love nest. Schreiber looks a bit young for the part of Jerry, but he too does well by Pinter's sharp dialogue and even sharper subtext. Slattery is also fine, especially when confronting Emma about a letter and when having a drunken lunch with Jerry. As their waiter, Mark Lotito makes an impression in a modest role.

Following its robust revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, the Roundabout is on a roll in its new/old theater on 42nd Street.

`Betrayal' Is a Dance of Deception

By MICHAEL KUCHWARA AP Drama Critic

NEW YORK (AP) - Harold Pinter's plays are famous for their pauses, moments of quiet in conversation as characters ponder what has been said - or left unsaid.

And the silences have never been as treacherous or as meaningful as they are in ``Betrayal,'' the playwright's understated yet unnerving dance of deception now being revived on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company.

That understatement has been preserved by director David Leveaux in a stunningly spare yet emotionally complex production that stars Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery. They are a formidable trio of deceivers, each involved in a love triangle that doesn't get any clearer the more the audience learns about it.

``Betrayal'' is an unnerving play because no one gets off guilt-free. Lies taint them all. The audience immediately sees the damage that has been done. What caused it is another story. Pinter's gimmick, if it can be called that, is to tell the story backward, in reverse chronological order.

When the curtain first rises on designer Rob Howell's pristine, almost all-white set, the affair is over. It takes another 90 minutes to find out what sparked it in the first place, but nothing is really explained.

Jerry, played by a quietly compelling Schreiber, is a writer. Robert, a publisher, is his oldest friend. And it's Emma, Robert's wife, who comes between them.

In the first scene, Emma and Jerry have an awkward, fumbling meeting, almost as if they were the married couple getting together after a long separation rather than illicit lovers. They speak haltingly of their own families, and Emma reveals her own helpmate has been cheating on her all along.

Insecurity pervades the whole play. The lovely Binoche exudes a vulnerability that gains her immediate sympathy. The actress has a haunted, hunted look that says a lot about what she is going through. She looks sensational, too, particularly in a smashing red party dress, also created by Howell.

The French-born Binoche, who won an Academy Award for her performance in ``The English Patient'' brings a Gallic sexiness to her portrayal of Emma. She handles Pinter's crisp, economical dialogue with surprising assurance and charm.

Slattery, all nervous energy and insincere smiles, is superb as Robert, the husband who is betrayed by his wife. Yet Pinter doesn't let him off the hook either. Robert's own duplicity is equally reprehensible. He knows of his wife's affair, while never letting on to her or his best friend.

The confrontation between husband and wife occurs midway through the play, in Venice no less, when the deception chillingly unravels over what would be the most obvious misstep: a letter sent to Emma from Jerry and seen by Robert.

The scene is quintessential Pinter. No histrionics, no crying, no recriminations. Slattery and Binoche handle this scary bit of truth-telling with absolute fidelity. It's a shattering, strangely emotional moment, with their civility speaking volumes about a betrayal that harms both the deceivers and the deceived.

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A Lean, Sensual Dissection of Adultery
Production, cast and sets provide a tight knot of emotional devastation

by Linda Winer
Staff Writer

BETRAYAL. By Harold Pinter, directed by David Leveaux. With Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery. Sets and costumes by Rob Howell, lights by David Weiner. Roundabout Theatre Company, 42nd Street west of Broadway, Manhattan. Seen at Friday's preview.

THE FIRST TIME we see Juliette Binoche's Emma she is sitting at a lone table at the far end of an austere English pub. The floor beneath the scene is turning, slowly, carrying the woman around to face the audience at the Roundabout Theatre Company as if she were a precious figurine on a carousel that had once carried joy.

It is an agonizing yet beautiful moment, ineffably sad with echoes of strange hope, and just the start of the deep-tissue emotional needlepoint of Harold Pinter's 1978 "Betrayal." This is the first Broadway revival of Pinter's least elusive major work, and although it feels thinner and meaner than we remember it, it remains a merciless 90-minute, three-sided dissection of adultery that moves backward from the last moment of an affair to the first frisson of furtive contact. In fact, the 1980 Broadway production was so wrongheadedly cast that, despite the wonderful 1983 film with Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge, this may as well be considered the premiere.

There can be no complaints this time about the production, lusciously cast with Binoche, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery. David Leveaux, the British director who gave Broadway last season's riveting revival of "The Real Thing"- not to mention the carnivorous "Electra" with Zoe Wanamaker and the erotic "Anna Christie" with Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson-has staged this power triangle to be lean, clean, extreme yet somehow sensual. Pinter has called Leveaux "a very delicate explorer." There is no betrayal here.

It is, however, everywhere else. The play - Pinter's least oblique - seems less robust compared to Tom Stoppard's more naturalistic and far friendlier infidelity drama, "The Real Thing." Nevertheless, "Betrayal" is a very elegant, tight knot of emotional devastation and the lethal unraveling of everyday deceit. The mysteries are not just who did what to whom, but what did anyone know and when did he or she know it.

But that sounds far too abstract for the shattering connections on this stage. The exquisite Binoche, who won her Oscar in 1997 for "The English Patient" and transfixed the West End two season ago in Pirandello's "Naked," is Emma, wife of Slattery's Robert, a publisher, and longtime lover of Schreiber's Jerry, a literary agent and Robert's best friend.

What could be a mere melodramatic triangle is transformed by Pinter's time-traveling mechanism. That is, we first see Emma and Jerry in that pub, two years after the end of their affair but, apparently, the day after Robert confessed his own adulteries and Emma confessed about Jerry. A few of the next eight scenes move slightly forward, but the important ones go back in time until, finally, we are at the moment Jerry first seduces Emma.

Binoche, in her New York debut, is an eerily transparent actress-all creamy skin and crisp features and a nervous system that refuses to let anything as easy as beauty disguise the demons. Schreiber, last seen in New York as Hamlet and at the Roundabout in Pinter's "Moonlight," has some of the playwright's own blocky, hard-to-read looks and an almost feline masculinity. Schreiber can make a deep inhale seem like a speech. Slattery matches them, knot for knot as the husband, a man we assume the wronged party until the deceptions pile up.

Although this is Pinter without the long pauses of his earliest work, Leveaux clearly honors the importance of stillness and watchfulness. Although "Betrayal" has far fewer of the playwright's ostensible ambiguities and plot assumptions, there remains the crucial uncertainty of memory-that is, the people we believe we know and actions we are sure we remember can make strangers of us all.

Rob Howell's sets and costumes are an inextricable part of the backward dance. Emma's clothes go from colorless grays back to the bright red of more innocent, open days. The set, a tall beige room with long shuttered windows, becomes increasingly less reticent and more free with the confidence of furniture and colors. Kate Wilson, the dialect coach, deserves special mention for making the American men sound so unerringly English.

Pinter has always said, "Life is more mysterious than plays make it out to be." Even in the ordinary ugliness of betrayal, the suspense can be a thrill.

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by Clive Barnes