At the opening ceremony of the Constitution Center in Philadelphia in 2003, just as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had concluded her Liberty Medal speech, the elaborate stage set began to collapse, threatening not only Justice O’Connor but also Senator Arlen Specter, Governor Ed Rendell, and Mayor John Street—a rogue’s gallery of judicial, legislative, and executive awfulness at the federal, state, and local levels. The rain falls upon the just and unjust alike, and, in this case, so did the Constitution Center. Nobody was injured, but the symbolism was impossible to miss, as though the Constitution itself were fighting back against those who had done it so much violence. It was like one of those medieval French church collapses thought to portend a plague or a war. Something not unlike that happened at a recent production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, when the technically feckless stage operators managed to interrupt the play not once but twice, and dropped a bit of scenery a short distance, as though the theater itself were telling poor Rachel Weisz that this overcooked soap opera was a poor investment of her time.
Betrayalis considered one of Pinter’s more significant plays, but it is a distinctly middling work, with little intrinsic interest, which perhaps explains both the need to sex it up with the star-power of Daniel Craig and Ms. Weisz as well as the gradual but unmistakable posthumous diminishment of the Nobel laureate’s reputation. Pinter’s gifts were considerable,