Betrayal

by Harold Pinter

seen at the Harold Pinter Theatre on 17 May 2019

Jamie Lloyd directs Tom Hiddleston as Robert, Zawe Ashton as Emma (his wife) and Charlie Cox as Jerry (his best friend) in a superb revival of Pinter's play about a the inricacies ad emotional costs of betrayal.

The design by Soutra Gilmour is mesmerisingly austere - a pastel shaded backdrop which occasionally slides forward; a grey floor containing a two-part revolve; a couple of chairs; at one stage a flimsy fold-out table; a few bottles of drinks (water or wine). This forces all the attention on the actors and on the psychological processes of the characters, and allows for maximum fluidity in a play that famously presents its story in reverse, starting with a meeting between Emma and Jerry two years after their seven-year affair has ended, and working gradually backwards until the first occasion on which Jerry confessed his love for Emma.

Betrayal

by Harold Pinter

seen at the Sumner Theatre (Melbourne) on 19 September 2015

The play, directed by Geordie Brookman and designed by Geoff Cobham, is a production from the State Theatre Company of South Australia. It stars Alison Bell as Emma, Mark Saturno as Robert (her husband) and Nathan O'Keefe as Jerry (her lover, and Robert's closest friend), with John Maurice as the waiter.

'Betrayal' works backwards from a scene in 1977 when the affair between Emma and Jerry has been over for some time, but her marriage is finally breaking up, through glimpses of scenes in earlier years which throw light on events we the audience have already been told about, to the party in 1968 during which the affair began. This is not really a series of flashbacks, since there is never a return to a 'present moment' in which flashbacks might be presumed to have taken place. Each scene is rather its own 'present moment', and only our prior knowledge of later events colours it in an unusual way. The result of this arrangement is that we soon learn to pay the closest attention to everything that is revealed, since so many details influence our understanding of the events as they are recollected by the characters later in their lives but earlier in our witnessing of them.