"During the 2010 Tokyo run of my play 'Anti-clockwise Wonderland,' I held a reading workshop of 'Betrayal.' That set me thinking I'd like to act one of the men in the love-triangle drama. So now at last I find myself doing that — and directing as well," Keishi Nagatsuka said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.
The acclaimed playwright explained that he came across "Betrayal" after returning in 2008 from a year's government-sponsored drama study in London, where its author, the Nobel laureate Harold Pinter (1930-2008), had long been a towering and influential presence.
Tokyo-native Nagatsuka, 39, said it was love at first sight when he happened on the Englishman's 1978 masterpiece that draws heavily on its author's own experience of an affair.