BETRAYAL is an inevitable part of human relationships – that’s what Nobel laureate Harold Pinter seems to say, anyway.
Canberra-raised performer Alison Bell is at the eye of the storm in a play coming to town from the State Theatre Company of SA.
Although Pinter tried to deny it was based on real life, it actually was, as Bell tells me by phone from Adelaide. For “Betrayal,” written in 1978 and admired as one of Pinter’s masterworks, has been described by his former lover, BBC broadcaster Joan Bakewell, as “like a diary”.
The central female character of Emma, wife to Robert and lover to Jerry, falls to Bell (and let’s get it out of the way, she’s got nothing to do with John Bell).
Born in nearby Young, Bell moved with her family to Canberra as a six-year-old and studied at St Clare’s and later the ANU, from which she took out a law degree, all the while performing in plays at school, with Canberra Rep and with Free Rain Theatre in its earlier days. After law, she took out another degree at the Victorian College of Arts.
Bell’s career hasn’t looked back from there, with a line of genuinely interesting roles for the Sydney Theatre Company, the Melbourne Theatre Company and the State Theatre Company of SA and multiple awards to match.
“I feel like I’ve been especially lucky in terms of my material”, Bell says. Take her role in “As You Like It” at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney; “It was a real honour to have a crack at Rosalind”, she says.
“But candidly, Shakespearean comedy very often isn’t funny; you can’t get around that. The jokes no longer work unless you change them.”
As for her award-winning role of Hedda Gabler, the Hamlet of the female acting world, she says: “Initially, I have to admit, it was intimidating.” But luckily the play was being directed by Geordie Brookman, who helped her focus “entirely selfishly” on her role.
Lucky then that’s he’s directing “Betrayal”, because far from being a super-cerebral Pinter play, it tells the story in reverse, enacting the key events of the previous seven years.
“There’s a lot of emotional cowardice in the play and that kind of stuff is very universal,” she says.
“That’s why I think people call it ‘great’, it could, after all, have been just a soap opera.
“The really clever thing about this piece is that while the major subject is a seven-year affair, in every scene there are tiny betrayals… ones we’re all guilty of on a daily basis, little white lies and sometimes bigger ones, like lying to get out of a difficult situation.”
Bell thinks this will resonate with the audience, not the adultery.
“If people are honest, they’ll recognise moments in their own lives when they have not been quite honest,” she says.
From an actor’s point of view, does she play it straight?
“We did it once in chronological order, just to see what would happen. But in reality you have to kind of peel off layer after layer, as you go, that’s the challenge,” she says.
“There’s something about the structure that keeps it moving, like unravelling a mystery.
“I don’t think it’s a taxing confrontation, I hope it’s not, but I do think it requires openness to engage with the difficult emotional terrain. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
Betrayal, The Playhouse, August 19-22 canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.
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