Betrayal

by Harold Pinter
at The Burton Taylor, until 1 June, 7.30pm

Emma is married to Robert. She has a seven year affair with Robert's best friend and fellow publishing colleague, Jerry. The events of the seven years of these two relationships unfold in scenes played in reverse chronological order from 2002 to 1993. The play begins at the end, when the two lovers, Jerry and Emma meet seven years after they started the affair, and ends, when it all began, with Jerry's first declaration of love for Emma.

Woven into the relations between the three, Jerry and Robert are also rivals in their professional spheres. Once successful poetry magazine editors, they now compete to discover the best new literary talent. Emma lives the affair through reading Jerry's successful authors, at the expense of Robert, who awkwardly can not stand popular modern prose novels posing as literature - "I hate brandy, it stinks of modern literature". Pinter has plenty to say on the subject of betrayal and literature.

The spectator is challenged to recreate the 'order' of familiar events in his own mind, and ask whether the affair was really worth it: Emma and Jerry never do leave their marital partners for one another. The lovers' excitement and the substance of the affair are in the act of maintaining the secret of their physical attraction, covering tracks and dealing with the guilt. But the events unfolding as a series of flashbacks and an excursion into the psychology of tripping nostalgically down memory lane, allow the playwright to stand back in moral judgment. The language of the play is reduced to expressing only the essential. The effect of this is a believable portrayal of a world inhabited by a certain fine-living, happiness-seeking, cultured type, who also aspires to the middle class conventions of family life, but without any clear moral demarcations.

The drama is well paced and the three actors fully sustain the attention of the audience. Emma (Jane Welsh) is particularly convincing at juggling her various identities, as a gallery curator and homemaker and her sexual identities. I would quibble slightly with the last scene - the beginning of the affair - as somewhat serious and overstated and missing the comedy of Jerry's absurdly contrived declarations of love for Emma. But this is a minor point, and unreflective of the rest of the play, which indulges freely in the playwright's dark sense of humour.

Stephanie Kitchen 29.05.02