Harold Pinter's Betrayal: The Patterns of Banality

Harold Pinter's Betrayal: The Patterns of Banality LINDA BEN-ZVI Harold Pinter's latest play, Betrayal, first produced in the fall of 1978 at the National Theatre in London under the direction of Peter Hall, bears many of the marks that one has been led to expect in a Pinter work. There are the familiar, long pauses between statements, the questions offered in response to questions, the limited dialogue - seventy-five questions and 1500 words in the thirty-one pages ofScene One.' Yet the play is a definite departure for Pinter. Gone are the carefully formed innuendoes, the sinister ambiguities, the impending disastersthose elements which led critics to label Pinter plays "comedies of menace." No Riley appears in the last scene to dislodge characters from their rooms, no McCann and Goldberg to interrogate, no Mick to threaten. Instead, presented in reverse chronologicalorder, the play concentrates on nine rather prosaic scenes depicting marital infidelity: Emma, married to Robert, has an affair with Jerry, Robert's best friend. Although the triangle, a configuration Pinter has studied before - nlOst notably in Old Times - does offer ample possibility for the sexual battles of will that produce menacing tones, Pinter has chosen to delete those traditional signposts leading to subtextual complications. By ascribing to the plot the power he usually reserves for some silent, vaguely formed area only hinted at in the text, Pinter has been able to create perhaps his most powerful play, rightfully earning the often made comparison with Chekhov. In Betrayal he seems sufficiently confident in the handling of surface detail so that he does not need to imply that the banal is merely a cover or pretext for some far more menacing - and more interesting - reality. The banal becomes, as in Chekhov's plays, the menace. The play contains only three major characters. The husband Robert is forty, a successful publisher, married for fourteen years to Emma, father of two children, and a former editor of a poetry magazine while a student at Oxford. His two interests, mentioned repeatedly throughout the play, are squash and Yeats. Jerry, a less confident, more stumbling version of Robert, mirrors him in 228 LINDA BEN-ZVI most respects. He is married to a doctor named Judith, has two children, is a successful "discoverer of writers," and was also an editor of a poetry magazine while at Cambridge. Though he talks about squash and Yeats, he acknowledges that he finds sports too strenuous at forty and that his taste for modem literature runs more to Ford Madox Ford than to Yeats. Emma, the central female figure , is even less specifically drawn. She is wife, mother, lover, and manager of an art gallery. Yet she does not occupy the familiar position that Pinter has assigned to women in other plays. She is not only an object for male conquest, like Jane in The Basement. She does not vacillate between the two carefully defined poles of female stereotypic behavior - madonna/proper lady/mother or temptress/destroyer/whore - like Sally in Night School, Stella in The Coilection, Flora in A Slight Ache, or the female characters in A Night Out. Instead, in Emma Pinter has finally created a believable female character whose struggles are depicted not as mere extensions of the more dominant and more central struggles of his male figures, and who is allowed to exist without being forced into any constraining preestablished female stereotype. The theme that connects the three characters and that structures the play is betrayal. The obvious problem of dealing with such a common, seemingly overworked, theme is discussed by Robert when he says to Emma in connection with a book she is reading: ROBERT Oh ... not much more to sayan that subject, really. is there? EMMA What do you consider the subject to be? ROBERT Betrayal. EMMA No, it isn't. ROBERT Isn't it? What is it then? EMMA I haven't finished it yet, J'lliet you know . ROBERT Well, do let me know. Pause Of course, I could be Ihinlting oflhe wrong book. (p. 78) Pinter's achievement in the play is to offer "more to say" on the subject and, at the same time, make clear that the...