Betrayal

Play (1978)
by Harold Pinter

With Gretchen Egolf (Emma), Alan Cox (Jerry), Mark H. Dold (Robert), Luis Negron (Waiter)

It is 1977 and Jerry (Alan Cox) and Emma (Gretchen Egolf) are having an affair. We see them in the flat which they have rented for their multi-year infidelity. Emma is married to Robert (Mark H. Dold), who we soon learn is a long-time close friend of Jerry. In fact, Jerry was Robert’s best man at his wedding. As the play moves forward, it goes backward in time a year or two at a time and we watch how the relationships and deceptions develop, all the way back to 1968 and the beginning of it all.

When I first saw Betrayal in the theatre, and then the film (1983) of the play starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge, I was struck by how normal it seemed compared to the earlier great Pinter plays like The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965). Its language was straightforward in a way that it was not in those earlier plays, in which every word was surrounded by a halo of absurdity. That echo of oddness that came off every line gave meaning to the notion of the Pinteresque, which came to signify a kind of vacancy that surrounded normal utterance. When Betrayal came out in 1978, that strange echo was far reduced. There was still some of it, but it had become integrated into normal speech in a new way.

While watching the current production, I was struck by the characteristically understated British tone of its discourse. The brief, allusive and clipped phrasing that signifies communication between these characters feels like it might have walked out of an episode of the great John Cleese comedy Fawlty Towers. Though Betrayal is not at all comedic, there is something ironic in its brevity and pungency. In the end, what it leaves off saying is far more important that what it does say, suggesting, as well, the psychological import of its drama.

How strange it is to think that the noted oddities of communication in the earlier works have developed, in this fairly mature work, into less odd, but more clipped, exchanges. It makes me wonder whether the grand philosophical absurdity associated with the earlier forms of Pinteresque utterance might have been projections onto a less evolved type of dialogue that was not intended to be so metaphysically refined. Though acclaimed as highly innovative, perhaps those were Pinter’s gestational attempts to arrive at the essence of miscommunication.

In any event, miscommunication in Betrayal takes the form of articulate rather than halting speech. Rather than characters inadvertently failing to make their points, they now do so intentionally.

In some ways, this play, though heartbreaking, is quite straightforward. Its reverse-time mechanism induces a sense of fatalism, closely allied, in its sense of inevitability, to the tragic. But, here, thanks to the reverse-time gimmick, the tone is ironic rather than tragic, leading ultimately to a sense of absurdity, basically in keeping with the generic Pinteresque idiom.

This production has a sleekness and elegance to it, represented very well by the clean sets which move in and out gracefully, escorted by a four part curtain which telescopes in like an iris on a camera lens.

The acting is generally restrained and quite sleek, leading to the sense that all the characters, though transgressing, are playing by strict rules of communication, and of miscommunication.

I found Mark H. Dold (Robert) to be especially compelling in this regard, revealing subtly, with his disciplined stature and proper disposition, a barely visible but penetrating sense of gravity and personal loss.

In the film version, as I recall, Robert, as played by Ben Kingsley, exhibits an emotionally sadistic quality that does not come across in this rendition. Here, Robert is much more singularly a victim, which makes the psychological drama seem less complex.

In the last scene, I was not sure that the more flamboyant approach taken by Alan Cox (Jerry) conveyed the original transgression as well as it might. He came across a bit more as a loser dandy than as an unrestrained and passionate seducer.

– BADMan