The specific description of the set reminded me of Gordon Craig’s ideas about sliding flats for an imagined production of Hamlet. Thank you.
Vis a vis Emma in Betrayal. Yes, the passion is missing, and she’s not forthright. Maybe if she sang The Ladies Who Lunch in her first scene and then Being Alivein the last scene. Of course I’m being facetious…but, yes….the pivotal, ugly scene, midway through, wherein the husband virtually crushes her soul….well, she never really fights back, does she? I don’t know who cd bring more to it than the deadened soul she is. Maybe a girl-woman like a young Judy Garland or Leslie Caron. But if she were to be a grown-up…we’d need to see her take a stand for something.
Anybody hear the story that Pinter’s real-life sketch for this was his own affair with the aristocrat Antonia Fraser, whom he, in real life, successfully stole from her husband and married…? There’d be an arc for Emma. |
