Arts
The whole truth
Peter Jenkins
Betrayal (Lyttelton) I used to suspect that the Pinter technique consisted in writing a play and then tearing up every other page of it in order to achieve the mystification for which he is famous and which I have usually found most irritating. It became the more irritating when he moved on from his Beckett-like beginnings and the so-called theatre of the absurd, best exemplified in The Caretaker, into a hybrid form of irrational social comedy, The Homecoming and more recently No Man's Land. Pinter has always been suspected of concealing an emptiness behind the form of his plays and beneath their perfectly overheard dialogue. If he was called a naturalist or realist it was because inconsequential dialogue, inarticulate non sequiturs and unfinished sentences — Pinter babble — brought him closer to everyday speech than any other writer. It was held also to be more realistic to present people behaving inexplicably on the grounds not that their behaviour is necessarily without explanation but that in real life we seldom know enough about people to understand their motivations and often see them in contexts to which the background of their lives may not be directly relevant. The closer he moved to social comedy, which requires another kind of realism, the less acceptable became Pinter's god-like pretension to move his characters in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform at the jerk of the off-stage puppet master; the mystery of the earlier plays, made more acceptable by their aspiration to universality and poetic atmosphere, had degenerated into a tease; who the hell did Pinter think he was?
In Betrayal Pinter has gone straight. He tells the story of a wife's affair with her husband's best friend. We are given all the facts we need to comprehend the plot and the behaviour of the three characters; nothing gratuitous, mysterious or menacing occurs off stage, although there lurks a man called Casey whom all three know at the periphery of their triangle and who seems to be waiting in the wings for Emma; moreover, the speech, middle-class for once, has become more stylised and elegant, although just as acutely heard. The three of them, publisher Robert (Daniel Massey), literary agent Jerry (Michael Gambon) and Emma (Penelope Wilton) who is Robert's wife and for seven year's Jerry's afternoon mistress. The story of their threesome begins at the end — the marriage breaking up, the affair over and ends at the beginning with a drunken Jerry grabbing Emma in her bedroom while a party is going on and promising her 'They'll never know.' The plot, which tracks sometimes back and sometimes forward in time, turns on who knows. The audience has the advantage over the characters and can ask itself thei question: is knowing all that counts? Robert, after five years, finds out about his betrayal by Emma and Jerry; Jerry is in turn betrayed by Emma when she omits to tell him of Robert's discovery; Emma the meanwhile discovers Robert's persistent betrayals of her. Betrayal is a completely unromantic account of infidelity, including the adultery of truth. A revolving stage enables us to see in clinically bare settings by John Bury the anxious reality of the lovers' flat — Emma worrying about the underutilisation of the crockery and furnishings — and the scenes from married life in which the truth breaks slowly out in all of its banality. The chronological scheme of the play gives a marvellous tension to the scenes which are mostly duets. The one in the Venetian hotel bedroom in which Robert discovers his wife's and his friend's affair together is made all the more dramatic by our prior glimpses into the stark intimacy of the Kilburn flat. The scene in which Robert and Jerry lunch together in an Italian restaurant in Soho (which contains a cameo performance by Artro Morris as the waiter) is made almost unbearable by our knowing that Robert believes Jerry knows that he knows.
As a piece of theatre writing Betrayal is a technical tour de force. It works perfectly on stage under Peter Hall's direction and there is not a false line in the script. It is as witty and funny as you would expect but at the same time moving and true. The acting could not have been better. Poor Pinter, or rather rich Pinter, for he is always being accused of presenting us with the wrong slice of life and of being inconsequential. Betrayal it is true, has no great pretension universality but I thought it dealt with ii5 subject with the blinding honesty of a true, artist. Isn't that enough or nearly enough' Long may the new Pinter continue telling us the whole truth as well as nothing but the truth.
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