Cinematic Fidelity and the Forms of Pinter's Betrayal

Cinematic Fidelity and the Forms of Pinter's Betrayal ENOCH BRATER Pinter's characters in Betrayal are boring. Preoccupied with children, home, extramarital affairs, tablecloths, and happiness, they recite the lines that have been assigned to them as educated, pampered, polite, moderately cultivated, upper-middle-class Londoners. Even their taste in modern literature is as unexceptional as it is predictable. Though they may occasionally feel obliged to read Yeats on Torcello or to take their summer holidays in the Lake District, what they really enjoy are the mundane little novels about ordinary people much like themselves in "the new Casey or Spinks.'" Here everything is ordered, fixed, and, above all, contained. Life does not pass these people by; it merely goes on for them. "Betrayal" is in this context a rather lofty word for such bourgeois and unimaginative infidelities. For Pinter's people in this play only think there is depth to their passions: though their lives are not exactly meaningless, the fact is they are not especially interesting. What is there about this trio, then, that compels us to study in detail every move they make as we reconstruct their sad, sometimes comic, and always ironic chronicle of who-did-what-to-whom, when, where, and under-what-circumstances? To answer these questions we must first take a hard look at some of the dramatic forms Pinter employs so skillfully in this work. Pinter's drama has for a long time been far more compelling for narration rather than plot. How his story develops is more impressive than the story itself. In Betrayal, moreover, it is practically impossible to separate the two. Every critic, of course, will notice that this particular tale is told (almost) backwards. There are three prominent exceptions to this rule, signified in Scenes Two, Six, and Seven by the simple intrusion of the unexpected stage direction "Later." Let us review for a moment the sequence of the scenes in the order in which we see them performed. Scene One takes place in the Spring of 1977 in a London pub. Emma and Jerry are present. Scene Two takes place later that same spring in the study of Jerry's house. Robert and Jerry are present. Scene Three takes 504 ENOCH BRATER place in the Winter of 1975 at the Bat Jerry and Emma have let at #31 Wessex Grove, Kilbum~ in this scene, of course, only these two characters are present. Scene Four takes place in the Autumn of 1974 at Robert and Emma's house. This is the first time all three players are on stage at the same time. The scene begins with Robert and Jerry alone (the former summons his wife offstage, who replies, "I'll be down"), and will end with the highly charged emotional impact of Emma in her husband's arms after her lover has departed: ROBERT and JERRY leave. She remains still. ROBERT returns. He kisses her. She responds. She breaks away, puts her head on his shoulder, cries quietly. He holds her. (p. 71) This is also the place where Pinter specifies an intermission is possible, literally pulling down the curtain on Emma's affair with her husband's "best man." Scene Five takes place in the Summer of 1973 in a hotel room in Venice. Only Robert and Emma are on stage, but Jerry insinuates himself as the crucial offstage presence in the shape ofa critical letter which gets into the wrong hands at American Express: To be honest, I was amazed that they suggested I take it. It could never happen in England. But these Italians ... so free and easy. Imean, just because my name is Downs and your name is Downs doesn't mean that we're the Mr and Mrs Downs that they. in their laughing Mediterranean way, assume we are. We could be, and in fact are vastly more likely to be, total strangers. So let's say I, whom they laughingly assume to be your husband, had taken the letter, having declared myself to be your husband but in truth being atotal stranger, and opened it, and read it, out ofnothing more than idle curiosity, and then thrown it in a...