At the Singapore Repertory Theatre
Shabana Azmi, Peter Friedman, Simon Jones

One of Harold Pinter’s greatest plays (and that’s saying a lot), Betrayal tells the story of an affair in reverse, from a gathering of two former lovers Emma (Shabana Azmi) and Jerry (Peter Friedman) two years after the end of the affair, to the moment of declaration of affection. Yet Betrayal is about far more than the most obvious betrayal of adultery. It is about betrayal in many forms: the ways in which we betray lovers, friends, and ourselves, and the way life itself betrays expectations of how anything should turn out. Emma’s husband is Jerry’s best friend Robert (Simon Jones), who seems initially the poor cuckolded husband, before the play betrays our own assumptions and expectations, with revelations of casual violence (”I’ve hit Emma once or twice”) and of Robert’s knowledge of his wife’s affair. It’s a love triangle of sorts, given how significant Robert and Jerry’s friendship are (Robert goes on, in a memorable bit, about why women shouldn’t join in their regular squash game).

The Singapore Repertory Theatre’s staging opens with a spare stage dominated by one large leather chair - all the better to spotlight Pinter’s economical language. as Jerry notes, not bitterly, “You remember the form. I ask about your husband, you ask about my wife”. Short cadences, each word gaining meaning later in the play when we learn the context behind it. The staging also serves to highlight the excellent acting of the two male leads, Friedman (is one obliged to say “the Tony-nominated Peter Friedman”?) and Jones. Less convincing is as Azmi as Emma, who comes across as a bit too mannered.

So Betrayal explores how its titular topic corrodes, stripping down love and friendship, infecting relationships. It also suggests an interesting question: is betrayal just the act of deceit itself, or is providing the confirmation of the act to the betrayed party an important part of betrayal? Dramatic irony naturally punctuates Betrayal, given that its structure means we are the only ones who know what the impact of the choices the characters are making. But even as the characters shed their knowledge by going back, we in the audience gain the burden of knowing, as we move inevitably towards the prelapsarian past: the play’s initial references to reading Yeats on Torcello or to the flat at Kilburn all gain added significance when Torcello and Kilburn are mentioned again.

By going backwards, the play pares away the layers of life that accrete onto one’s character - responsibilities, pregnancies, and so on - to a singularity: Jerry first declaration of love to Emma, “You are the only thing that has happened”. At the end, we are left to reflect that it all seems such a promising start, with the universe collapsed into one person. And through this chronological regression, Betrayal manages to ask us the same, awkward question that anyone who’s ever had a breakup or anyone who’s had a friendship gone awry asks: how did things get to this point?

Founded in 1995 by theatre director Lucy Bailey and violinist Nell Catchpole, the Gogmagogs defy description - even after watching “Gumbo Jumbo”, as their stew of a show was called, it was kind of hard to explain just what the troupe/orchestra are about. I suppose the best way to describe them would be as classical musicians who incorporate the physicality of theatre into their work - so, for instance, seven players come on stage with six string instruments, and the Gogmagogs spin that off into a madcap series of instrument-grabbing, bowing of each other’s instruments, and other amusing moments. Yet while frequently funny, “Gumbo Jumbo” never smacked of gimmickry or ’stunt musicianship’, perhaps because the theatrical aspect is just as important as the music: the tunes play off the physical motions, and vice versa. A highly entertaining 90 minutes of masterful, and occasionally mustachioed, musicianship.

Dir. Aidli ‘Alin’ Mosbit
A Teater Ekamatra production
The Esplanade Theatre Studio

As the title implies, Impenjarament is a play about imprisonment in Singapore; specifically, it depicts the stories of eight inmates as they struggle to deal with life in prison. The prisoners - all acted excellently by the all-male cast - at various times tell the stories behind their imprisonment: the South Asian overstayer who unwittingly had an illegal visa, the old Malay man who committed a crime of passion, the Javanese man who wants desperately to leave the country, the Chinese man who fights, the failed bank robber. The litany of stories is heartbreaking, particularly when, as the inmates themselves show, the moment that led to imprisonment was often borne of hotheadedness, often reversible.

The play pulls no punches about prison life, from the deprivation that makes the smell of grass a luxury to the brutalities of prison rape. But just as inmates make bitter jokes about their conditions to make the conditions more bearable, Impenjarament sprinkles in moments of levity: dance, standup comedy, cross-dressing as weepy mothers and cackling wives.

Perhaps the play’s most striking feature is its use of space: the black box of the studio is laid out such that audience members sit interspersed on the path between the inmates’ cells and the centre of the stage, while all around surveillance monitors depict a man screaming out questions in the isolation cell as he teeters on the edge of sanity. (Admittedly, the blocking made for some awkward moments for the audience members - the multilingual nature of the play naturally required subtitles, but it wasn’t always possible to crook one’s head to read the subtitles and look at the prisoner speaking at the same time.)

Getting to know their personal stories naturally makes the prisoners sympathetic characters, and that stands as perhaps the best possible antidote to the play’s own undertone of cynicism about whether an ex-convict will be accepted by society: clearly, sensitising an audience to the underlying individuality of convicts will have an impact on how they are treated.

Where Impenjarament falters is when it tries to say something universal about everybody being a prisoner - the message feels heavy-handed and clumsily hammered in, which stands in sharp contrast to the vivid depictions of the individual prisoners. That aside, however, the play is a stark depiction of what it means to be a prisoner in Singapore, and a strong reminder of the humanity of a class of people often treated as monsters.

At the Royal National Theatre Lyttelton, London

If George III was famously insane, George IV’s place in English history has always been that of clown Prince. Indeed, the entire third series of the “Blackadder” British sitcom pokes fun at his buffoonery and penchant for women. The Royal National Theatre’s current production of Nick Stafford’s Battle Royal will do nothing for the reputation of the royal bigamist, and it is not entirely clear it will do that much for Stafford’s reputation either.

A bewildered woman placed into a court she knows nothing about who then goes on to win popular sympathy and support; a Crown Prince who loves a woman other than the official Princess of Wales: comparisons of the marriage of George, Prince of Wales (later George IV) and Princess Caroline of Brunswick, which is the central focus of Battle Royal, with the more recent Charles-Diana union are inevitable. Thankfully, Stafford’s script is quite rightly informed, but not overly influenced, by the present (although the playwright does slip in some clever jibing lines such as “the Tories are the natural party of government”).

Royal in-fighting, however, had far more import in the early 19th century than simply providing column inches for tabloids, and the incongruous collision between the petty demands of both sides and their meaning to the nation stands at the heart of the play. This is particularly true of Acts II and III, after George ascends to the throne and schemes to outmanoeuvre the queen he does not love. That the personal is political is a given: even servants plot actions to help the parties they favor.

It all culminates in the bitter (and hypocritical, given that George was already married to Maria Fitzherbert when he became engaged to Caroline) trial of Caroline on charges of adultery, a trial which the Caroline-George antipathy has acquired political implications (Whig-Tory ones, to be precise). Director Howard Davies, who previously directed the engaging The Iceman Cometh, should be credited for the quality of performances coaxed out of his actors. Zoë Wanamaker (last seen on Broadway as a stunning Electra) plays Caroline superbly. Her princess matures visibly, starting out as an awkward ingenue thrust into an unwanted marriage and finally coming into her own, winning the support of the public against her husband. (Even excepting the famous English love for underdogs, Wanamaker’s performance leaves the audience no doubt as to who to root for.) As the swaggering George, Simon Russell Beale exudes an upbringing of excess both lustful and gluttonous not only in his fine performance, but through his very stage appearance. Appetites will collide, and Stafford suggests that much of the conflict stems from the passionate nature of both royals (”Love and hate are not opposites. They share the same opposite – indifference”).

But while the first act conveys the squabbling with a deft comic touch, with wonderfully cutting verbal sparring between George and Caroline, the other two acts fails to fully engage. What unfolds is often sketched with too broad a brush, with characters reduced to mere symbols. Take, for instance, the scene where Caroline dances with members of the Italian peasantry, an easy stock image – think Kate Winslet with the yobbos in Titanic – meant to convey Caroline’s wild spirit and her comfort with the lower classes. Like the disastrous boat film, however, the dancing mostly seems to be merely a means of explaining the upper-class woman’s affection for her common lover, in this case the Italian Majocchi (an unimpressive Benny Young). Battle Royal is told on a rotating stage, but the frequent scene changes, while impressively smooth, give the play the impression of a story told solely in newsflashes, without any development in between. Small wonder the short intermission between Acts II and III was greeted with much checking of watches and slight murmurs of discontent.

The rotating stage does highlight that much of history seems to be merely moving in circles. The royal couple may reach detente at the end of Battle Royal, but the 3¼-hour play itself leaves us with no sense that we have seen something any different from the tawdry spectacles of fighting celebrity couples that make up our present-day news fodder. Fortunately, the spectacular performances of Wanamaker and Beale rescue Battle Royal from the plebeian. Still, all the walking both do onstage is apropos: this is a play that often remains downright pedestrian.

This review first appeared in The Harvard Crimson under the title “The Sadness of King George”.