The emotion behind Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal.”
BY HILTON ALS
In a series of interviews conducted with the British-born playwright Harold Pinter in 1971, Mel Gussow said that he was struck by the emotion and lyricism in some of the author’s post-“Homecoming” works, such as “Silence” (1969) and “Old Times” (1971). Gussow went on to ask the forty-one-year-old playwright if he felt that he had to “guard against emotion.” Pinter, giving a rather Pinteresque response, said, “I don’t quite understand you.” Then: “What I’m interested in is emotion which is contained, and felt very, very deeply. Jesus, I really don’t want to make a categorical statement about this.” Not that it would have helped. Ever since his plays began captivating audiences, in 1960, Pinter had defied certain expectations, including what a play was. A series of pauses? A subversion of theatrical drama as a self-consciously expository occasion? Conversations that defied easy explanation or logic?
Indeed, when Antonia Fraser met and fell in love with Pinter, in 1975, passion was the last thing she expected from him. (They married and lived together until Pinter’s death, in 2008, three years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.) Still, if you looked closely enough, Pinter the lover was always there, but in a way that wasn’t necessarily clear. As a screenwriter, certainly, the author was at his best when his focus was adultery, the lies of love, and its misremembered memories and elisions, as played out in movies ranging from “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964) to “The Go-Between” (1970) and beyond.
It’s the spaces between love that make his 1978 drama, “Betrayal,” so interesting. The play is now being revived at the Barrymore by Mike Nichols, who was set to direct the film version early on until the project fell through. The three main characters—played by Rachel Weisz, Daniel Craig, and Rafe Spall—are besotted by the power of their own secrets and indiscretions. Fraser writes in her memoir, “Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter,” from 2010, that Pinter based the play on an affair he’d had with the television newscaster Joan Bakewell in the nineteen-sixties, when he was married to the actress Vivien Merchant. Pinter didn’t realize that Bakewell’s husband knew about the affair. What’s more erotic than a secret? And if that secret is revealed, is the affair de-eroticized, or are the lovers free to live openly, without guilt or regret?
Pinter’s great subject was Englishness, and its stereotypical negative traits, especially repression. He made repression a style—even when they’re saying vile things, it’s amazing how nice Pinter’s characters can sound—without forsaking the passion he had known himself. It just took him a while to write about how turned on he was by infidelity. In “Betrayal,” one man thinks he has the power because he’s doing something illicit with his friend’s wife, while the cuckolded friend knows he’s in the right by not protesting out loud, and by withdrawing. In silence.
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