Betrayal – review
David Cote
October 27, 2013: Mike Nichols and his cast get so much wrong in the Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal (1978), let's start with what goes right. It's a handsome physical production, with large, well-appointed interiors by Ian MacNeil wafting in and out to composer James Murphy's moody noodling and glowing with Brian MacDevitt's evocative lighting. Daniel Craig shucks off his 007 persona to become Robert, a successful book publisher whose wife, Emma (Rachel Weisz) conducts a seven-year affair with Robert's friend Jerry (Rafe Spall), a literary agent. The compact, rugged Craig hasn't shrunken from years behind the camera: he projects himself fully and muscularly to the back stalls. Craig even enlivened vastly inferior material when last he was on the Great White Way, in the 2009 police melodrama A Steady Rain. And he's not emoting in a vacuum: Weisz and Spall have charisma to spare, not to mention keen sexual chemistry for their Kilburn flat trysts. So the design is lovely, the cast is appealing and the play itself, while of its time, is not essentially dated. It's simply that nobody gets the tone
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