ENGANY

One of a few plays I am happy to reread/rewatch. Harold Pinter's inspiration for this was his long-term affair with Joan Bakewell, and he has said how he felt betrayed when he learnt that Joan's husband had known about the affair for a long time and not confronted him. And a wonderful exposure of human nature in the first scene when Jerry says, having heard talk that his ex-lover is seeing another man that he felt irritation that no one gossiped about us like that. Funny and painful, sparse mundane dialogue and plenty of pauses that speak a thousand thoughts. And an arresting back-to-front structure, so the audience know more than the characters as the play progresses. Wonderfully thought-provoking about relationships and what we remember about ourselves. ( )

BUT I WANT THIS NOW!!!

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I actually listened to this as a BBC Radio Drama (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kr71s)that starred Olivia Colman and Andrew Scott. I'd heard he'd won the BBC Audio Drama, Best Actor Award for it, and I liked him from BBC Sherlock so I thought it would be interesting.

This is a interesting play. First of all, it's presented chronologically backwards... We meet the two people who had an affair after their affair is over, as they are having a discussion over lunch. The woman reveals she has told her husband that she'd cheated on him with the ex-lover, who is his best friend. He's angry because she didn't consult him first, and then we hear his conversation with his friend... who has really known for several years. The ex-lover / wife had lied when we first heard her.

It proceeds from there, slowly revealing various lies the friends/spouses/lovers have told each other over the years and highlights their reactions to the various "betrayals".

Very thought provoking. I think my favourite moment of the play was when Andrew Scott's character, Jerry, angrily shouts at his best friend, Robert, for not telling him that he's known about the affair that he'd had with his wife, Emma, for four years... Jerry feels a fool for thinking all was fine between them and that his betrayal of his friend with Emma was a secret, while his friend Robert simply didn't act on the knowledge and acted normally. The bizarreness of Jerry being angry about NOT being confronted for having an affair with his best friend's wife was incredibly well acted... and while he didn't really have any moral right to be angry, you could see why he was upset. Both Emma and Robert knew the truth was out, and neither had told him.

It was really a great moment, well acted... In a play full of moments worth listening to. Makes you think about all the different lies and different kinds of betrayals we have in daily life.

(Evidently the play was based on the author's real life affair with a famous female BBC broadcaster.) ( )

An interesting twist on a familiar tale of infidelity - Pinter tells the story backwards. He begins at the end, and ends at the beginning, so you already sort of know how it's going to "end", but you stick around because he has hooked you by the peculiar twist. Without that gimmick, it might be just another familiar story with nothing to keep you in your seat. The dialogue is stark and nearly barren, but that can be misleading. It isn't so much the words the characters say as the interplay between the characters, what the words mean rather than strictly what they say. ( )

I studied Pinter years ago at school and fell in love with his plays. I was prompted to re-read Betrayal because of an imminent trip to see a theatre production and I had forgotten just how good a play this is. The dialogue is sparse and deceptively simple, but is sharp and cuts like a knife to the core of the play, 'I don't need to think about you.' The simple device of telling the story of an affair backwards enables Pinter to expose the complexities of the affair, enabling this play to transcend the mundane, and, as Samuel Beckett commented to Pinter, 'wrings the heart'. ( )