OCT: 6—29 2006 BETRAYAL By Harold Pinter

Behind the intimate study of sexual infidelity lurks an affinity of betrayals: friendship, art and the integrity of self. This is Nobel-award winner Pinter at his most lethally ironic.

Pinter has never written anything simpler, sadder or funnier than Betrayal. It’s about those banal twin demons, impossibility and necessity. Jerry and Emma love each other, and their love weaves a labyrinth of betrayals that extend beyond the relationship and touch something at the heart of every living creature. Emma betrays her husband; Jerry betrays his best friend and also his own wife. But it turns out that Robert has been betraying Emma with other women. And there is nearly an infinite vista of betrayals within the play: Jerry and Robert are successful figures in the publishing world, but Pinter hints that their careers are also betrayals of a deeper vision that they once had. Their civilized acceptance of these endlessly breeding betrayals finally creates a quiet revulsion that brings the affair to a desolate close.

Pinter finds a grim but delicate beauty and humor in such desolation. Each line, each word, is a drop distilled from the sloshing mess of ordinary emotion. "I don't think we don't love each other", Emma tells Jerry in their last meeting in the flat where they've shared seven years of stolen afternoons. The double negative is childlike in the pathos of its pleading logic. Pinter is just as keen on the ambiguities of male friendship. "I've always liked Jerry," Robert tells Emma after he finds out about the affair. "To be honest I've liked him rather more than I've liked you. Perhaps I should have had an affair with him myself."