Betrayal starring Kristin Scott-Thomas – Round-up of Reviews

A round-up of reviews of Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre starring Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Ian Rickson’s new production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles, at the Comedy Theatre until 20 August 2011.

Over a period of nine years, Pinter’s play shows the high price of passion and the damage inflicted by desire, exploring how our loves and our losses echo and accumulate through time.

See a round-up of Betrayal reviews, below.

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KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS in Betrayal

Hollywood star Kristin Scott Thomas returns to the West End in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.

Kristin Scott Thomas was last on the London stage playing Arkadina in Ian Rickson’s celebrated production of The Seagull at the Royal Court Theatre. She won the 2008 Olivier Award for Best Actress, reprising the role on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater the following year, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions.

Her other theatre credits include Jonathan Kent’s production of As You Desire Me and Michael Blakemore’s production of Three Sisters both for the Playhouse Theatre in London.

Scott Thomas’s extensive film credits include most recently Sous Ton Emprise, Une Femme Parfaite and Nowhere Boy as well as Easy Virtue, The Other Boleyn Girl, the multi-award winning Gosford Park, The Horse Whisperer, The English Patient, Mission Impossible, Angels & Insects, for which she won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, for which she won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a supporting role and the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress.

She has just completed filming on Bel Ami and Salmon Fishing in Yemen, both due for release later this year. On television her credits include Gulliver’s Travels, Belle Epoque, Body and Soul, Weep No More My Lady and The Secret Life of Ian Fleming.

Kristin Scott Thomas joins Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles in the cast of Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre, in Ian Rickson’s new production of Harold Pinter’s play, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions.

Book tickets to Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre

Rehearsal Photos: Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre starring Kristin Scott Thomas

Ian Rickson’s new production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal has started previewing at the Comedy Theatre in London.

Produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, the play stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles.

Written by Harold Pinter in 1978, the world premiere of Betrayal took place at the National Theatre, directed by Peter Hall with a cast comprising Daniel Massey, Michael Gambon and Penelope Wilton and went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. In 1983 David Jones directed the Academy Award and BAFTA nominated film of Betrayal with Patricia Hodge, Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley.

Photos by Michael Birt.

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Betrayal cast information and news

Betrayal starring Kristin Scott Thomas – Special Offer Save £12.50 on tickets

Save £12.50 on tickets to see Betrayal starring Kristin Scott Thomas at the Comedy Theatre in London

Offer valid Friday matinees at 5.30pm

An all-star production of Harold Pinter’s 1978 play Betrayal comes to London’s Comedy Theatre this month.

Directed by Ian Rickson, the play stars Hollywood actress Kristin Scott Thomas, plus theatre and TV stars Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles. Betrayal runs from 27 May until 20 August 2011.

Set over a period of nine years, the play charts the high price of passion and the damage inflicted by desire, exploring how our loves and our losses echo and accumulate through time.

Kristin Scott Thomas was last on the London stage playing Arkadina in Ian Rickson’s celebrated production of The Seagull at the Royal Court Theatre. She won the 2008 Olivier Award for Best Actress, reprising the role on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater the following year, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, who also produces this production of Betrayal.

Enjoy a special offer on the Friday early evening shows of Betrayal, which promises to be a truly thrilling night at the theatre.

LINKS

SPECIAL OFFER: Save £12.50 on tickets to see Betrayal starring Kristin Scott Thomas at the Comedy Theatre in London

Offer valid Friday matinees at 5.30pm

First Look Photos: Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre starring Kristin Scott Thomas

Ian Rickson’s new production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal opens at the Comedy Theatre on 27 May 2011, with an press night on 16 June.

Produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, the play stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles.

Written by Harold Pinter in 1978, the world premiere of Betrayal took place at the National Theatre, directed by Peter Hall with a cast comprising Daniel Massey, Michael Gambon and Penelope Wilton and went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. In 1983 David Jones directed the Academy Award and BAFTA nominated film of Betrayal with Patricia Hodge, Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley.

Photos by Michael Birt.

LINKS

Betrayal cast information and news

BEN MILES in Betrayal

Coupling star Ben Miles joins Kristin Scott Thomas in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.

Ben Miles was last on stage playing the Duke in Michael Attenborough’s production of Measure for Measure at the Almeida Theatre.

Previously his theatre credits included Tom in Matthew Warchus’ multi award-winning production of The Norman Conquests both at the Old Vic and on Broadway, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, My Child for the Royal Court, Bolingbroke in Richard II for the Old Vic, The Cherry Orchard, The London Cuckolds and Mary Stuart for the National Theatre and Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Ben’s TV work includes leading roles in Coupling, Lark Rise to Candleford, Freezing and Sex, The City and Me all for the BBC, as well as roles in Cold Feet, Prime Suspect, Hustle, Sea of Souls and Trial and Retribution. His film credits include Speed Racer, V for Vendetta, The Affair of the Necklace and The Wings of a Dove.

Ben Miles joins Kristin Scott Thomas and Douglas Henshall in the cast of Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre, in Ian Rickson’s new production of Harold Pinter’s play, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions.

Book tickets to Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre

DOUGLAS HENSHALL in Betrayal

Primeval’s Douglas Henshall joins Kristin Scott Thomas in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.

Douglas Henshall was last on stage playing Satan in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at the Almeida Theatre.

His other theatre credits include The Cryptogram for the Donmar Warehouse, Death of a Salesman at the Lyric Theatre, The Crucible for Sheffield Theatres, The Coast of Utopia for the National Theatre and American Buffalo for the Young Vic.

On TV Douglas is best known for playing Nick Cutter in the long running ITV series Primeval. His other television credits include Joe Astell in South Riding, Jim in The Silence and Conan Doyle in The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle, all for the BBC, Alex Gansa in Lewis and D.I. John Tolin in Collision, both for ITV and Daniel Nash in Psychos for Channel 4. His many film credits include Dorian Gray, French Film, Flying Lessons, Dead Long Enough, Ripley Underground, It’s all About Love, The Lawless Heart, This Year’s Love, If Only, Fast Food, The Big Man and Angels and Insects in which he starred alongside Kristin Scott Thomas.

Douglas Henshall joins Kristin Scott Thomas and Ben Miles in the cast of Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre, in Ian Rickson’s new production of Harold Pinter’s play, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions.

Book tickets to Betrayal at the Comedy Theatre

Betrayal tickets at the Comedy Theatre starring Kristin Scott Thomas

Ian Rickson directs a revival of Harold Pinter’s 1978 play Betrayal, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles.

Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall And Ben Miles In Harold Pinter’s Betrayal Directed By Ian Rickson

Tickets go on sale today (5 April 2011) for Ian Rickson’s new production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles. Betrayal, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, will have its first preview at the Comedy Theatre on 27 May 2011 with press night on 16 June and is booking until 20 August 2011.

“I’ve always rather liked Jerry. To be honest, I’ve always liked him rather more than I’ve liked you. Maybe I should have had an affair with him myself.” Sometimes you’ll find there can be three people in a marriage…… Over a period of nine years, we are shown the high price of passion and the damage inflicted by desire. Harold Pinter’s play explores how our loves and our losses echo and accumulate through time.

Kristin Scott Thomas was last on stage playing Arkadina in Ian Rickson’s celebrated production of The Seagull at the Royal Court Theatre for which she won the 2008 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress, reprising the role on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater the following year, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions. Her other theatre credits include Jonathan Kent’s production of As You Desire Me and Michael Blakemore’s production of Three Sisters both for the Playhouse Theatre in London. Her extensive film credits include most recently Sous Ton Emprise, Une Femme Parfaite and Nowhere Boy as well as Easy Virtue, The Other Boleyn Girl, the multi-award winning Gosford Park, The Horse Whisperer, The English Patient, Mission Impossible, Angels & Insects, for which she won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, for which she won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a supporting role and the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress. She has just finished filming Bel Ami and Salmon Fishing in Yemen, both due for release later this year. On television her credits include Gulliver’s Travels, Belle Epoque, Body and Soul, Weep No More My Lady and The Secret Life of Ian Fleming.

Douglas Henshall was last on stage playing Satan in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at the Almeida Theatre. His other theatre credits include The Cryptogram for the Donmar Warehouse, Death of a Salesman at the Lyric Theatre, The Crucible for Sheffield Theatres, The Coast of Utopia for the National Theatre and American Buffalo for the Young Vic. He is best known on television for playing Nick Cutter in the long running ITV series Primeval. His other extensive television credits include Joe Astell in South Riding, Jim in The Silence and Conan Doyle in The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle, all for the BBC, Alex Gansa in Lewis and D.I. John Tolin in Collision, both for ITV and Daniel Nash in Psychos for Channel 4. His many film credits include Dorian Gray, French Film, Flying Lessons, Dead Long Enough, Ripley Underground, It’s all About Love, The Lawless Heart, This Year’s Love, If Only, Fast Food, The Big Man and Angels and Insects in which he starred alongside Kristin Scott Thomas.

Ben Miles was last on stage playing the Duke in Michael Attenborough’s production of Measure for Measure at the Almeida Theatre. Previously his theatre credits included Tom in Matthew Warchus’ multi award-winning production of The Norman Conquests both at the Old Vic and on Broadway, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, My Child for the Royal Court, Bolingbroke in Richard II for the Old Vic, The Cherry Orchard, The London Cuckolds and Mary Stuart for the National Theatre and Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His many television appearances include leading roles in Coupling, Lark Rise to Candleford, Freezing and Sex, The City and Me all for the BBC and Cold Feet for ITV as well as roles in Prime Suspect, Hustle, Sea of Souls and Trial and Retribution. His film credits include Speed Racer, V for Vendetta, The Affair of the Necklace and The Wings of a Dove.

Written by Harold Pinter in 1978, the world premiere of Betrayal took place at the National Theatre, directed by Peter Hall with a cast comprising Daniel Massey, Michael Gambon and Penelope Wilton and went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. In 1983 David Jones directed the Academy Award and BAFTA nominated film of Betrayal with Patricia Hodge, Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley.

Born in 1930 in East London, playwright, screen writer, director, political activist and actor Harold Pinter wrote thirty-two plays, twenty-two screenplays and directed thirty-six theatre productions. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, and was awarded the Companion of Honour in 2002. His many awards include the Laurence Olivier Award and the Moliere D’Honneur for Lifetime Achievement, the European Theatre Award and the Legion d’Honneur. In October 2006 Pinter performed Samuel Beckett’s monologue Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson. Harold Pinter was married to Antonia Fraser, with whom he lived from 1975 until his death in 2008.

Ian Rickson most recently directed the critically acclaimed production of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour which continues its run at the Comedy Theatre until 7 May 2011. Rickson was Artistic Director of the Royal Court from 1998-2006 where his many productions included Krapp’s Last Tape which he also directed for BBC4, Fallout which he also directed as a film for Channel 4 and The Weir and Mojo both of which transferred to the West End and Broadway. He has directed Jez Butterworth’s The Winterling, The Night Heron, Mojo and Parlour Song as well as Jerusalem, which, following sell-out runs at the Royal Court and in the West End, will begin previews on Broadway on 2 April 2011 starring Mark Rylance. For the National Theatre he has directed The Hothouse and The Day I Stood Still.

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Book tickets to Betrayal starring Kristin Scott Thomas at the Comedy Theatre

The Norman Conquests Review

THE NORMAN CONQUESTS – Old Vic

Calling Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests a towering tour de force and the greatest theatrical achievement of his long and distinguished career is little more than stating the obvious.

First produced in 1974, this Chekhovian mix of comedy and pathos offers up pleasure and pain in more or less equal proportions, and, as a comment on middle-class values and mores, it remains unrivalled and unequalled.

Set over a summer weekend in the garden, dining room and sitting room of a rambling Victorian country house, Ayckbourn the magician has conjured up three separate plays, each one satisfying in itself but even more satisfying when experienced as a trilogy.

Nor does it matter in which order you you see them. Technically, Table Manners comes first, followed by Living Together, and ending with Round and Round the Garden.

I saw the last one first and caught the other two at a matinee and evening performance. But it would have made no difference to my enjoyment had the order been reversed. The plays are so skilfully structured and meticuloulsy interlocked that whichever way you approach them, the rewards are plentiful.

Though the trilogy’s seven and a half hour running time doesn’t yield a great deal of plot, it’s full of incident – some side-splittingly hilarious, others heartbreakingly poignant.

And while all six characters work very much as an ensemble, the two standouts are assistant librarian Norman (Stephen Mangan) and Annie (Jessica Hynes), a spinster who shares the family home with her (unseen) bedridden mother.

Though Norman is married to Annie’s testy sister Ruth (Amelia Bullmore), Annie has agreed to go on a dirty weekend to East Grinstead with her brother-in-law.

But circumstances intervene, and instead of Annie’s anticipated liaison with Norman she spends the weekend at home in the company of her long-suffering real-estate agent brother Reg (Paul Ritter), his bossy wife Sarah (Amanda Root), and Ruth, who reluctantly turns up after receiving a drunken phone call from Norman.

The sixth character is Tom (Ben Miles) a local vet, whose attraction to Annie is camouflaged by an almost catatonic personality that refuses to acknowledge any emotion and who, when he finally plucks up the courage to propose to Annie, obliquely asks her whether she would like him to marry her. Indeed, at times he is so stupid and so obtuse, you wonder how he ever successfully completed his veterinary degree.

In a series of memorable set-pieces, most conspicuously during a family-meal in Living Together, Ayckbourn explores the relationships endured by these six very different people, and, in the process, leaves no emotion unexcavated.  If Norman’s self-acclaimed modus operandi is simply to make people happy, it is his philandering ways that, in the end, wreak the most havoc, albeit with hilarious results.

Annie’s plight, on the other hand, is not entirely of her own making, nor is it as funny. Encroaching spinsterhood, a sterile relationship with Tom, and a nonnegotiable commitment to her monstrously selfish mother – have strait-jacketed her. Her misery and frustration are palpable.

Ayckbourn’s uncanny ability to mix laughter and pain so potently is, apart from his theatrical sleight-of-hand, his greatest gift. In The Norman Conquests he demonstrates this ability at full throttle.

All the performances are flawless. You will find no better ensemble acting in London, and, in a season that boasts impressive revivals of Ivanov, Six Characters In Search of an Author, No Man’s Land, Waste and Creditors, that’s saying something.

Matthew Warchus’s direction is alive to the play’s vast, forever changing emotional landscape, and not a mood nor a nuance is missed. Surely this has to be the theatrical event of the year.

CLIVE HIRSCHHORN. Courtesy of This Is London.

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