08 February 2019
Newsdesk
Rehearsals began this week for The Jamie Lloyd Company production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal which runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 5 March 2019 for a strictly limited season ending on 1 June. Directed by Jamie Lloyd, the production stars Golden Globe, Olivier and Evening Standard Award winner Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox.
To mark the event, a new triptych of cast images by photographer Charlie Gray has been released.
With poetic precision, rich humour and an extraordinary emotional force, Betrayal charts a compelling seven-year romance, thrillingly captured in reverse chronological order. The complexities of the human heart are explored in this, “the greatest, and the most moving, of all Pinter’s plays” (The Daily Telegraph).
Tom Hiddleston returns to the London stage as Robert following his acclaimed Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh and his Evening Standard Award-winning performance in Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014.
His theatre credits include: Hamlet, Coriolanus, Ivanov, Othello, Cymbeline, The Changeling. His film credits include: Avengers: Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarok, Kong: Skull Island, I Saw The Light, High-Rise, Crimson Peak, Thor: The Dark World, Exhibition, Only Lovers Left Alive, Avengers, War Horse, The Deep Blue Sea, Thor, Archipelago, Unrelated. His television credits include: The Night Manager, The Hollow Crown (Henry IV Parts I & II, Henry V), Wallander, Miss Austen Regrets, The Gathering Storm.
Zawe Ashton will play Emma. Like Pinter, Ashton was born in Hackney, London. Known for her roles in television sitcom Fresh Meat, the comedy series Not Safe for Work, Wanderlust and the forthcoming Velvet Buzzsaw, Zawe starred in The Jamie Lloyd Company production of Jean Genet’s The Maids at Trafalgar Studios and played the title role in Lloyd’s production of Salomé for Headlong.
Charlie Cox, who plays Jerry, is best known for the leading role in Daredevil for Marvel, Tristan Thorn in Stardust, Jonathan Hellyer Jones in The Theory of Everything and Owen Sleater in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. On stage, he appeared in the 2008 production of The Lover & The Collection, directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Comedy (now Harold Pinter) Theatre, the title role in The Prince of Homburg at the Donmar Warehouse and Nick Payne’s Incognito in New York.
Betrayal is presented by The Jamie Lloyd Company, Ambassador Theatre Group Productions, Ben Lowy Productions, Gavin Kalin Productions and Glass Half Full Productions.
Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, London in 1930. He lived with Antonia Fraser from 1975 until his death on Christmas Eve 2008.
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter was lauded throughout his life as one of the greatest living playwrights, who had a revolutionary impact on how theatre was written and performed, and who it represented on stage. An establishment agitator who challenged injustice, he became as famous for his political interventions as for his writing later in his life.
His genius was recognised within his lifetime as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, the Companion of Honour for services to Literature, the Legion D’Honneur, the European Theatre Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award and the Moliere D'Honneur for lifetime achievement. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, in addition to 18 other honorary degrees.
After working as an actor under the stage name David Baron, Pinter went on to be a theatrical playwright, director, screenwriter and actor.
He wrote his first play The Room in 1957 and from there 29 plays, including The Birthday Party, The Hothouse, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man’s Land, and Betrayal. Sketches include The Black and White, Request Stop, That’s your Trouble, Night, and Precisely.
Pinter directed 27 theatre productions, including James Joyce's Exiles, David Mamet's Oleanna, seven plays by Simon Gray and scores of his own plays including his last, Celebration, paired with his first, The Room, at The Almeida Theatre, London in the spring of 2000.
In film he wrote 21 screenplays including The Pumpkin Eater, The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Sleuth.
He continued to act under his own name, on stage and screen. He last acted two years before his death in 2006, when he appeared in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson.
SCHEDULE
Tuesday 5 March – Saturday 1 June 2019
Monday – Saturday 7.30pm, Thursday and Saturday matinees at 2.30pm
Tickets available below.
