Amanda's affairs of the heart

THE talk is of affairs and why Harold Pinter’s 1970s play Betrayal needs to stay in the decade in which it is set. “You can’t change it – there are too many references. Affairs are very different with a mobile phone,” explains Amanda Ryan, who heads the cast of the revival at York Theatre Royal.

“It would totally change the entire relationship if you moved it out of the 1970s. I remember having a relationship pre-mobile phone and how you got hold of them, leaving a message on their parents’ phone and things like that. It was very, very different. You can send a sneaky text now and then delete it. So the production had to be the 1970s.”

Pinter’s play, which is being directed by Juliet Forster, tells of Emma who is married to Robert, but having an affair with Robert's best friend Jerry. The play begins at the end of the affair and travels backwards, with a few detours, to show Emma and Jerry getting together in the first place.

Ryan had viewed scenes from the play that were used in a workshop or class setting. A number of famous actresses have played Emma, including Kristin Scott Thomas, Dervla Kirwin and, most recently on Broadway, Rachel Weisz opposite husband Daniel Craig.

“All I can do is come at it to imagine myself in that scenario,” says Ryan, who counts the film Elizabeth and TV series Shameless and Attachments among her credits. “Being a famous play and being Pinter, people have very strong ideas or expectations about who Emma is, how she sounds, the kind of relationship she has, the love that’s in the affair. To make sense of the affair and her motives, I have to ignore what people might think or say.”

In addition, there’s the fact that the play has been exposed since its premiere as being inspired by Pinter’s affair with broadcaster and writer Joan Bakewell. Ryan says that they’ve deliberately not explored that avenue of research. “Obviously writers use their own experience, but ultimately this isn’t their relationship. We decided that although it was interesting as a piece of historical information, it wasn’t necessarily going to inform either how we approach the characters or the love affair that happens within the play. We thought, ‘That’s interesting, now let’s forget it’.”

She has doubts sometimes (“am I right? Am I Pinter enough?), but this will be her version of the role not someone else’s. Although Forster has decided not to change the 1970s setting, there was an awareness about the emotional approach. There are few stage directions and Ryan understands the recent US production was more violent, more aggressive than previous ones to make it more contemporary.

“So we talked about where to pitch it. We wanted to find something that was truthful and maybe a bit freer than old school versions of the play. You don’t want to get too buttoned up because if you get three people walking around the stage showing no emotion and talking in posh voices you think ‘who cares?’ rather than seeing the human beings underneath.

“In rehearsal we took that to the extreme so we knew what was underneath. Juliet said if you feel like screaming, then scream; if you feel like crying, cry. That won’t be in the production, but helped us understand how the characters were feeling.”

She once auditioned for Pinter, when he was directing a show at the National Theatre. “I just remember him being a big man. I don’t mean outsized, but something about him was big,” she says.

Theatre got Ryan interested in acting. “We didn’t have a TV when I was a child and didn’t see many movies because going to the cinema was pretty expensive. It was more doing it at school from when you’re a kid, and from the age of 12, I was always involved in some kind of after-school drama group. When I was 16 and did that careers thing ‘what do you want to do?’ I knew I wanted to be an actor, which my parents were totally fine about.”

Finding work was “probably much easier” when she started than now. She was extremely lucky to leave Rada with a good agent and go into doing a lot of television. It was very smooth moving from training into the professional world. Probably too smooth, she adds.

What worries her now is the lack of female roles in general and female roles after a certain age in particular. She refers to a recent decision by several London West End theatres to agree to a quota to employ equal numbers of men and women each year. “Something has to shift. We’re 50 per cent of the population and yet I don’t think we’re 50 per cent of employed actors. I think all theatres should be forced annually to employ exactly the same amount of actors and actresses,” she says.

“New writing is where it begins. Why not write more female characters? When you go out into the world there are 50-50 men and women. Within the classical theatre Maxine Peake is playing Hamlet and a recent production of the White Devil changed the main baddy from a man to a woman. If you’re going to do the classics, there has to be a finer way to make it more balanced in terms of gender.”

n Betrayal: York Theatre Royal, tomorrow to October18. Box Office: 01904-623568 and yorktheatreroyal.co.uk