Daniel Craig Heads Back To Broadway With 'Betrayal'
A revival of Harold Pinter's play Betrayal is in rehearsal now in New York. It's the story of an affair, and it unfolds backwards in time, from the lovers sharing a post-romantic drink to the passion they first experienced seven years earlier. Along the way, much deception — betrayal, even — is revealed.
Daniel Craig, who stars as the jilted Robert, tells NPR's Robert Siegel that the show, first performed in 1978, still feels "surprisingly contemporary. ... When you have someone as good as Pinter it remains timeless. And the themes are timeless. It's just good writing."
The men in the story are Oxbridge literati — denizens of a culture familiar to Craig's co-star and real-life wife, Rachel Weisz, but not the sort the actor himself, who left school at 16, would have run with.
"It's as far away from me as possible, I suppose," the actor acknowledges — though he notes that he did eventually go to college to study acting, a career he knew pretty early on he wanted to pursue.
"Very early," he stresses. "Just the desire to dress up and show off — which is still with me. [It] got me when I was probably about 4 or 5, I think."
Craig also notes that the production, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Rafe Spall as the man Weisz's character has the affair with, features at least one implication — based on a line about who should have cheated with whom — that wasn't in the original staging.
"[Pinter] said there's no homosexual overtones at all in the play," Craig says. "But obviously we're throwing loads in. Just to let you know."
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