“I've I directed many, many Pinter plays,” says Hyde Park Theatre artistic director Ken Webster. “I've directed The Homecoming twice, and The Collection, and A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station… lots of Pinter plays. But never got around to doing Betrayal.”
Webster has long been a fan of Harold Pinter, and he has wife to thank for his four-decade-long connection to the playwright. “Actually, Kathy Catmull, my lovely wife, the fabulous actress – she turned me on to Pinter very early in our relationship, in 1985,” Webster says. “I'd never read a Pinter play, and we did The Homecoming together at Hyde Park and we did it again 10 years later. We've done quite a bit of Pinter over the years, just never Betrayal. It's really great to bring the show to Austin audiences [now].”
This month, Webster is finally directing Betrayal at Hyde Park Theatre. “I've been wanting to do it for a while and I just had auditions,” he says, “and a bunch of new people who I haven't worked with before showed up, some really great actors. We've got Juliet Robb and Brennan Patrick and Steve Guntli and David Stahl playing the Italian waiter.”
It’s an intimate story made a bit more complicated by its famously nonlinear storytelling. “There's a common misconception that the play goes backwards in time,” Webster says, “which it does quite a bit, but it it's not always going backwards. Sometimes it goes forwards. It's a love triangle that spans between 1968 and 1977. Jerry and Robert are best friends, and they're both married, and Jerry has an affair with Robert's wife, Emma. It starts out in 1977, after the couple has broken up, the affair has ended, and then the next scene is a few hours later. Then it starts going back in time, but then there's a section where there are three scenes that all happen in chronological order, going forward. Then it resumes going backwards, and then the very final scene is in 1968, and it's a party where the affair first begins.”
That mostly-backward-but-sometimes-forward progress is a challenge for the cast “and [for] the audience,” Webster says, “but our amazing designers – Robert Fisher's doing the sound design and the projections, and we project on the stage floor prior to each scene what year it is and what location. And so it helps the audience keep track of whether we're going forward in time or backward in time. [And] the props and the costumes are all period and it’s been really fun getting that all together.
“And even though it's a drama, like a lot of Pinter plays, they are serious in tone, [but] there's a lot of humor. There's usually a lot of witty banter in his plays, and the all these [main] characters are very bright and intelligent. It's such a terrific script. It's very moving and kind of scary at times – are they gonna get caught? And… besides there being betrayal, there are lies. There's a lot of lying going on between 1968 and 1977. Yeah, it's just a terrific script for actors. And audiences really adore it as well.”
