Robin Lefevre's production is the final element of the Gate Theatre's mini-festival celebrating Harold Pinter's 75th birthday, which received unexpected endorsement in the form of Pinter's Nobel Prize for Literature last week.
Lefevre and his cast capture much of the play's surface-level elegance, but the subtext of heat, emotion and desperation is only sporadically suggested. It is by now well known that the play, first staged in 1978, charts the progress of an affair in reverse, so that the dramatic tension lies not in what happens next, but in who knows what when. The play's mystery and, to a large part, its richness lie in what stays concealed: why, in separate scenes, do husband and wife Emma and Robert not reveal to Jerry (her lover and his best friend) that Robert now knows about the affair? Are the married couple playing erotic power games, as is suggested by their embrace after a tense and unexpected meeting with the still-clueless Jerry - a particularly potent suggestion here, since Cathy Belton's subsequent dissolution into tears doesn't quite convince.
On reflection, Robert's choice to keep mum doubtless has to do with his larger complicity: we discover in an early (that is, late) scene that he, too, is a philanderer. There does seem to be a touch of male fantasy, however, in Emma's elusiveness, which is unfortunately reinforced by Belton's oddly self-conscious, sway-backed posture; she seems constantly to be leading with the groin. Nick Dunning is totally convincing in the plum role of Robert, and the production's high point is his repressed fury in a drunken lunch scene with Jerry. The encounter has a bitter humour that is sometimes lacking from the production as a whole. In the final scene, the choice to have Risteard Cooper play Jerry's first advances on Emma as a rapid-fire drunken barrage adds to the overall impression of cynical coldness; this is a relatively passionless Betrayal.
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