There are many different kinds of betrayal in Harold Pinter’s play. One of them was the very act of writing about a relationship, inspired by Pinter’s own affair with Joan Bakewell while she was married to the TV producer Michael Bakewell, an advocate of Pinter’s early plays.
But it would be a mistake to dismiss Betrayal as a lightweight exposition of middle-class adultery and guilt, in which literary agent Jerry betrays his best friend, the publisher Robert, by embarking on a seven-year affair with Robert’s wife, Emma. Or indeed to suggest that its only real interest is in its structure: largely, but not entirely, working backwards from a date two years after the end of the affair to the spark when it ignited at a party.
This is very much a period piece – Sarah-Jane Potts’s girlish Emma is first glimpsed in 1977, channelling Annie Hall big time. But Paul Jepson’s revival recognises that the heart is a deceitful thing and that the real betrayals in the play are of the self.
These people are not particularly nice – egotists, everyone – but every now and then we catch a glimpse of the people they might have been. The betrayal is of promise and possibility snuffed out like a candle, and of memory itself, which is fickle and unreliable. Time is a betrayer too, showing no mercy. Timothy Bird’s cool, clever design offers a series of visual clues that point both backwards and forwards, endlessly highlighting the ironies.
Jepson’s revival sometimes overplays the pauses and the preview I saw lacked the emotional charge that would set the play alight. But it boasts fine performances. Simon Merrells hints at Robert’s emotional sadism towards both wife and friend, and the bitter wormwood pain of a man who once loved poetry and now flogs commercial novels, while Nick Moran captures the bleakness at the hollow heart of Jerry.
- At the Northcott, Exeter, until 5 March. Box office: 01392 726 363.
