Deceit on display

When it comes to adultery, few contemporary plays match Harold Pinter's Betrayal.

With what sad cynicism Pinter exposes the way that lies and concealment become the stock in trade of middle-class, extramarital lovers and male best friends.

How great the change from Noel Coward's Brief Encounter, 40 years earlier, which had us believe adultery was just not the done thing. Premiered at the National Theatre in 1978, with Peter Hall suavely directing then as now, Betrayal startled theatre-goers by being so un-Pinterish in its clarity about what was going on. There is no doubt here about who is having whom and why.

So Hall's new production, with Janie Dee's underpowered Emma enjoying a secret seven-year affair with literary agent Jerry, best friend to her publisher husband Robert, leaves an odd feeling of frustration.

Those of us stirred by Pinter's view of life and people as mistily inscrutable and enigmatic rely upon him to leave us bracingly mystified. But in Betrayal, Pinter lucidly shows how marriage and adultery may run in tandem for years.

Each scene discloses more evidence of how all three characters have lied to each other and betrayed trust. This repetitiveness quite deprives a mildly amusing comedy of marital bad manners and elegy for lost idealism, of any serious dramatic tension. The novelty of Betrayal lies in the way it mainly moves backwards in time rather than forwards.

The play begins in 2003 - the date for each scene displayed in neon - when Emma meets her discarded lover, Jerry, ostensibly to talk of old times. Her intention is really to tell him she has decided to leave her husband after discovering about his own long-term career as an adulterer.

Each scene, whether between the lovers or the two supposedly best friends, moves us closer to the beginning of the big love affair and also discloses how much they all conceal from each other.

For example, Hugo Speer, whose powerful, Pinteresque performance as Robert, conveys a sense of suppressed pain and anger, knew for years just what his wife and friend were committing. And when in Venice Miss Dee, who weeps some unconvincing, guilty tears, is goaded into revealing her adultery to Robert, Speer allows himself just two, terse shouts of fury. His symptoms of grief are rare signs of emotional engagement in the play.

Pinter has written eloquently about men who have sexual relations with the same woman. But in Betrayal, the relationship between Robert and Jerry, friends from their University days, never assumes any emotional weight or depth. Aden Gillett's Jerry is a shallow, shifty adulterer while Miss Dee, as one of those erotic Pinter women, who take more than one man effortlessly in their stride, neither yields to painful sexual guilt nor relishes her double erotic life.

Speer's Robert, the all-knowing, inscrutable fall-guy in the adultery game, best captures the rueful, disturbing mood of a play whose coup is finally to reveal the love affair as just a long term wallow in the shallows.

Betrayal