In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, starring Tom Hiddleston. Here’s an excerpt.
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“Betrayal” was seen here six years ago in a revival directed by Mike Nichols and starring Daniel Craig that still failed to eke out more than an 83-performance run. Why, then, bring it back now? Because Tom Hiddleston, as the kids say. A classically trained actor with extensive stage experience who is thoroughly qualified to act in a highbrow show, Mr. Hiddleston is also Marvel’s Loki and, in that capacity, one of the stars of “Avengers: Endgame,” the highest-grossing movie in history, which explains why one of Pinter’s dullest plays is drawing sellout crowds on Broadway.
A more-than-semi-autobiographical tale of adultery (Pinter was the real-life betrayer), “Betrayal” is told in reverse chronological order. Even so, it’s far less elliptical than the pause-packed stage plays that put its author on the map of English-language theater. It’s as though he’d decided to go back and fill in all the gaps in “Old Times,” his earlier, infinitely more enigmatic study of a three-way relationship. Unfortunately, Pinter’s new-found willingness to let his characters come right out and say what they’re thinking led not to lucidity but triteness…
In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I call for shorter, better biographies. The immediate occasion is the publication of Con Chapman’s Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges, a biography of Duke Ellington’s great alto saxophone soloist, which is 227 pages long and contains not a single wasted word:
As I read “Rabbit’s Blues,” I thought: Why aren’t there lots of books like this? Biographies have been growing longer and longer for decades now, and even when they’re about deserving subjects, they’re still likely to be far too clotted with hour-by-hour detail to suit the needs of the general reader. What I’d like to see, by contrast, are brief lives of artists about whom it would be pointless to publish what we now think of as a full-length book—the supporting players of art, so to speak….
“Jed Harris, in the full tide of success, could not imagine that anything he would do would fail; this is a form of imagination that must be acquired early by anyone who consigns his life to the theater.”
