Theater: Splinteresque

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BETRAYAL by Harold Pinter

At Britain's National Theater, Harold Pinter is throwing the eternal triangle into reverse. In the first of nine scenes he stirs the ashes of an adulterous love affair in 1977, and in the last reveals its flash-fire inception in 1968.

Jerry (Michael Gambon) is a literary agent married to Judith, whom we never see. Robert (Daniel Massey) is a publisher and Jerry's oldest friend. Jerry was Robert's best man when he got married to Emma (Penelope Wilton). In the drunken pass that ignites the affair in Scene 9, Jerry says to Emma, "I should have had you, in your white, before the wedding." Lust will find a way. Jerry rents a place in the country, and the pair make love in the afternoons. But joy is applied like a cosmetic, and pain is masked in a clipped orgy of understatement.

The play's tension stems from the classic Watergate question: Who knew what and when? Clues are left around by the lovers and consciously ignored by their spouses. Pinter astutely realizes how often the right not to know is invoked by the cuckolded. The real betrayal of the title seems to be the violation of the ritual of male bonding. Jerry worries very little about what he is doing to Judith, but he feels guilty as hell about what he is doing to Robert. In a Pinter play, woman, whether Ruth in The Homecoming or Stella in The Collection, is the catalyst of male discord.

Betrayal is blessed in its stars. Massey's Robert speaks with a honed intelligence. The presence of Wilton's Emma would warm any flat, and as for Gambon's Jerry, he is a fond slave of love, though perhaps too passive to be a literary agent. Few playgoers can have left The Caretaker and The Homecoming without being viscerally shaken up. Quite a few may leave Betrayal, with its anesthetized passions, feeling vaguely shaken down.

—T.E. Kalem