Pinter's Betrayal: Bringing Back Empathy

...Although he has written characters, like Davies in The Caretaker, whose feelings are fully exposed, for the most part the fear, the pain, the aggression in Pinter's people are kept on the leash of a language in which both the commonplaces and the coolness of delivery serve as opaque covers through which the emotional subtext can be more sensed than seen...

...To anyone who remembers Vivien Merchant in The Homecoming, all ice and subterranean fire, the three performers in Betrayal are positively operatic...

...The theme is loss, possibility circumscribed, community dissolved...

...Although the story is told in reverse, 1977 to 1968, it is an identifiable triangle play in which the love affair, the marriage and the friendship of the two men come to an end...

...he says, and she offers question for question, "What do you consider the subject to be...

...Julia's Jerry is a particularly impressive creation...

...GERALD weales 14 March 1980: 149...

...the end of the play shouts a beginning that we know must end in disaster...

...Oh...

...What the American actors have brought to the play is an overt emotionalism which seems foreign to Pinter—at least to ^re-Betrayal Pinter...

...The characters have careers (a publisher, an agent, a gallery owner), bits of biography (Jerry went to Cambridge, Robert to Oxford), offstage families, but the play is still Pinter enough to keep the three figures in isolation, allowing them to enact a number of brief scenes which gain their resonance from one another not from any reference to the world outside...

...Betrayal has a verifiable plot which is neither an arbitrary dramatic situation, like those in The Caretaker and The Homecoming, nor a cat's cradle of ambiguity, as in Old Times and No Man's Land...

...As Walter Kerr said in his very appreciative review of Betrayal (New York Times, Jan...

...not much more to say on that subject, really, is there...

...Insofar as that is his intention, the American performers serve him well...

...It is not until the play, like Emma's novel, is finished that we really know that, and it takes the reversal in time to make it clear both intellectually and emotionally...

...He gives Emma her tears at the end of the first act, calls for Jerry to bury his face in his hands in the second scene...

...20), Pinter has succeeded with the device, getting ever richer overtones as the events in the past are played against our already having seen where they will lead...

...His readings, I assume, are the result of his attempt to create a character who is trying desperately to use his words as a lid to smother his feelings, but the effect too often is to suggest speeches in quotation marks...

...Unlike The Caretaker with its rich use of English slang and the rhythm of lower-class urban dialect, The Betrayal is written in conventional English and its rhythms are less those of verisimilitude than of artistic decision...

...Many of the English reviewers greeted it with regret as a retreat to aesthetic conservatism...

...Commonweal: 148 ance, Robert is so acceptingly balanced between them that they form a tight group, ripe with expectancy...

...At first glance, the playwright's decision to allow his play to move backwards in time may seem an attempt to stifle the effects of its use of conventional plot and character...

...Yet the resonances achieved are not that different from those in which a play, working with ordinary time, allows a remark in the first act to give extra meaning to another one at the end of the play, an echoing process of which Pinter has always been a master...

...In the last scene, which is the first, Jerry is so exhilarated in his newly voiced love for Emma, she is so attracted to that exuberCOMING: 'Waiting for Lefty on the Campuses' by Milton Mankoff...

...Who is coming home to whose home in The Homecoming"} If the theme is betrayal, as the title suggests, which of the many betrayals—of marriage, of love, of friendship—is the central one in the play...

...Of course, Pinter is partly responsible...

...Both Blythe Danner and Raul Julia have moved into Pinter's language and made themselves at home...

...It is as though, in introducing a familiar plot intoBetrayal, Pinter turned to conventional theatrical empathy...

...She may be talking about the affair with Jerry which she is about to confess to Robert, but I think she is also commenting on the play itself...

...There is a fascinating scene in the play in which Emma and Robert are discussing a novel which he refused to publish and which she is reading with pleasure...

...Betrayal," he says, but she insists,''No, it isn't," although she cannot name the subject because "I haven't finished it yet...

...many of the American reviewers greeted it with enthusiasm as an advance to empathetic accessibility...

...Who is taking case of whom or what in The Caretaker...

...There is something a little old-fashioned about' 'betray'' in this context, an Edwardian elegance that suggests Spooner's use of the verb in No Man's Land...

...Betrayal" sits a bit uncomfortably in the mouths of these three characters...

...For this reason, I think it is a mistake to open each of the two acts with offstage noises, evocations of city streets, of romantic Venice which suggest a social context the play neither develops nor needs...

...For all their sense of holding back, however, they break through the surface of their words frequently...

...A few critics—William Collins in the Philadelphia Inquirer, for one—have questioned the success of American actors with Pinter's lines, but the American voices do not seem to me to be a problem in this play...

...In the many interviews that mushroomed around the production of Betrayal, the actors have discussed the need to suppress feelings in the playing of Pinter...

...Pinter titles have always played games, setting off questions that can tease a playgoer...

...Pinter, as always, is fascinated with the unreliability of memory—Jerry and Emma differ about whose kitchen it was in which Jerry lifted her daughter high above above his head—but Betrayal, however soft-edged in its details, gives the audience a firm place to stand...

...I suspect that Pinter wants the reversal to work thematically as well...

...The performance that goes wrong to my ear is that of Roy Scheider, as Robert, the husband, for he seems too often to be emphasizing the lines as lines...

...Everyone is right after his fashion...

...Betrayal is the mechanism, a human failing...

...Quite the contrary...