Betrayal

Harold Pinter's 1978 play starts at the end of an affair. Emma and Jerry have met for a drink, ostensibly to catch up but in truth for Emma to inform her former lover that she and her husband Robert have finally split up. Emma and Jerry's seven-year affair finished two years before: now everything, as Emma says, is over.

Pinter choreographs the story of Emma, Robert and Jerry (Robert's best friend) backwards. In giving the audience the advantage of foreknowledge, the interest lies in discovering the extent to which each relationship is built on a complicated structure of truths and lies.

With Aden Gillett's uncharismastic, unseeing Jerry little more than a cypher, the real narrative crackle is in the marriage between Emma and Robert and the friendship between Robert and Jerry.

The implicit suggestion is that the respective relationships are silently fuelled by the lies and deceits of all three people; Pinter's chilly, brutal point is that some relationships need the comfort of lies to achieve some sort of truth.

For all its uncompromising commitment to brittle emotional truths, and the depth charge beneath the things that are not said - as much as the things that are - there remains the feeling that Pinter's portrait of adultery is not as shocking now as it was 25 years ago.

Perhaps all three performances never quite convince that there is anything sufficient at stake. Or perhaps adultery has become too familiar to be terrifying.

Betrayal