Although the play was written in 1978, its emotional right hook lands with as much impact as ever, Bell says. When Beat speaks to her she’s performing in Canberra. You’d imagine the story must make any number of audience members squirm with uncomfortable familiarity. “There’s a lot of black humour in the play,” Bell says. “You get a different reaction each night, some nights people laugh at everything, the next night you’ll have silences and the audience gets into it as drama; it’s interesting to see the changes. It’s wildly different every night.”
With such a famous play, is there added pressure to ‘get it right’? “The starting point is always words on the page,” says Bell. “With Pinter it’s all about what is not said. The woman I play obfuscates and hints; she never articulates things directly, never comes out and says what she wants. The puzzle of the piece comes together when you look at how things are not said. It’s about intelligent articulate characters, but emotionally they’re lacking in courage, they’re inarticulate emotionally. When you look at it on the page it’s so truthful, I didn’t find the task of playing Emma arduous, it happened through the normal investigation of the text, once you imagine how she’s revealed by the curious interactions she has with the other characters.”
There are interesting challenges inherent for actors in any production of Betrayal with its sparse dialogue with a backward spiralling plot; because the play jumps around in time, going backwards mostly, in many scenes the characters know less than they did in the scene before and are carrying ‘less baggage’ than they did a moment ago. “It demands something very particular,” says Bell. “I have to walk on stage with an enormous amount of emotion I haven’t accrued on stage that I then have to peel off, in moving forwards, you get to take one scene to the next scene only a couple of times. Usually the script accumulates emotion and you can let the narration drive you, but in Betrayal we have to keep peeling back, cut loose the stuff which we’ve just done, we have to trick our psyches.”
How difficult is it to discard the psychological dynamics of one scene in order to move into the next scene in the same story with the same characters? “People talk about actors finding a touchstone in each scene to get them ready for the next one. In the rehearsal period we plotted how to use any emotional residue from the scene before that’s useful, to use as a starting point, it’s not necessarily connected to what you do, you identify just a quality. It’s a useful tip. You can go from a scene where you’re angry to a scene where you’re on holiday but there’s a sadness in one scene you can manipulate to take you into the next scene.” One way of emotionally ‘anchoring’ a scene, Bell says, is being conscious of what she’s doing physically. “I’m very clear of the starting point in each scene in terms of gesture, I know exactly the place on stage where I start,” she says. “I use tiny movements, my breathing changes, my walking changes, they are small moments and before I go on stage I’ll shake the tension out of my hands. Does she choreograph each of those tiny gestures; are they the same each night? “They are mostly organic. I’ll start the top of the scene the same way each night, for instance there’s a scene when I’m with Jerry and I have my arms in a certain position and I’ll start that way each time. It’s an interesting play in terms of that stuff, it’s so intimate, so restrained, the characters are quite still in the piece, but there’s so much tension, so much happens underneath, all in the subtext. The tension is in the actors’ bodies.”
What’s it really like performing love scenes on stage? “It’s always a little weird to begin with,” Bells says with a chuckle. “It helps if you have a rapport, that’s a great starting point. To create chemistry, sometimes you just have to laugh a lot with your first stage kiss. Then you’re just in thrall to the story and it doesn’t feel odd; we’re not Nathan and Alison, we’re Emma and Jerry. It helps that we’re pals. It’s a strange job that we do.” It must be hard to act closely with someone you really don’t like? “I’ve been lucky with all my leading men, they have been excellent humans; it’s a pretty good community, the acting world. It’s quite rare not to like each other.”
Bell says the biggest stumbling block is an intellectual one: how does Emma actually manage to have an affair in the first place? “Emma has a baby, I have a baby myself so I think – how does she do this? It made me think about how she has a great need for this relationship to continue, to sustain this for so long, to be so willing to compromise, to overcome the challenges of being a new mother to maintain her relationship with Jerry.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
