BETRAYAL BY HAROLD PINTER

SUMMARY, THEMES, SIMILAITIES WITH SAMUEL BECKETT

Harold Pinter was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, political
activist and poet. He was among the most influential British playwrights of
modern times, and in 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Pinter says of this work that, "It's like opening a door, and you suddenly realize
you're on a plain of gold. . . . I think there's no question what excited me was the
image of one family dislocated but very much part of each other."
That sense of dislocation, of people being intimate strangers, together and apart
at the same time, is central to Betrayal (1978).

Characteristics of Pinter's work
Pinteresque
That Harold Pinter occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his
name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular
atmosphere and environment in drama: 'Pinteresque' "placing him in the
company of authors considered unique or influential enough to
elicit eponymous adjectives.
Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and
unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and
pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power
struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived
as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterised as
'comedy of menace', a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play
of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In
a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or
their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled
existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past.
The influence of Beckett on his plays has been recognised by Harold Pinter.
Like Beckett, Pinter waits for the dawn of a better world. For
the Absurdists humanity is waiting for the appearance of the ideal order and it
shares the psychology and existentialist idealism of the two tramps Estragon
and Vladimir in Becketts play Waiting for Godot. The question when
will Godot come is not different from the question when will a better society
come into existence, both in connotation and significance. Pinter has taken
the Beckettian models of presenting the existential suffering of humanity, but
his depiction of the despair experienced by the individual is certainly different
from that of the other writers of the Absurd theatre. The Absurdist playwrights
do not follow the Aristotelian rules of writing plays, but this does not decrease
the effectiveness of the absurdist plays. In fact, the Absurd theatre gives a
psychological shock to the audience by showing the absurd ideas and absurd
activities of persons who do not know how to come out of the abyss of anxiety.
Pinters plays provide an indepthanalysis of the concept of the Absurd theatre.
II. THE SETTING

Betrayal takes place in various locations, mostly in London, between the years
1968 and 1977. The London locations include a pub, an Italian restaurant, an
apartment rented by Jerry and Emma for their adulterous afternoons, a room in
Jerry's house, and the living-room and bedroom of the house belonging to
Emma and her husband, Robertwho is Jerry's best friend. There is one scene
that takes place outside of London, in a hotel room in Venice during a holiday
trip taken by Emma and Robert. These settings are contemporary, urban,
generally upscale, revealing the affluent, professional nature of the lives of
these three characters.
More important than the physical locations, however, is the temporal "setting."
The first scene of the play takes place in 1977, the last in 1968. Thus, the play
moves generally backwards in time, from the end of Jerry and Emma's affair to
its beginning.
This counter-clockwise presentation of events results in one of the strongest
dramatic qualities of the play: the audience's ironic knowledge in almost every
scene of what is going to happen to these people next in their lives. For
example, near the end of the play, as we watch Jerry and Ellen have the first
afternoon rendezvous in their hideaway flat, we are aware that all this
enthusiasm and pleasure will end six years later in disappointment and--the
central preoccupation of the play--betrayal.

III. THE PLOT

The play begins in 1977 as Jerry and Ellen share a drink together in a London
Pub after not having seen each other for two years. Their last meeting marked
the end of a seven-year-long adulterous affair, which began in 1968--not long
after Emma's marriage to Robert--and ended in 1975. Robert and Jerry, we soon
learn, are best friends, Jerry having served as best man at Robert's wedding.
Jerry asks whether Emma has been having an affair with Casey, a writer for
whom he serves as literary agent. Her ambiguous reply leads Jerry to believe
that she has. Emma then informs Jerry that she has invited him to this meeting
because she and Robert had decided the night before to get a divorce. She tells
Jerry that Robert has been unfaithful to her for many years with several
different women, and she also informs Jerry that she has told Robert about their
affair during the course of the previous evening's conversation. The first scene
thus ends with a disturbing portrait of numerous lives simultaneously bound
together and divided by infidelity and dishonesty.
The second scene compounds this impression. Jerry arranges to talk to Robert
about Emma's confession. On meeting with Robert, Jerry is flabbergasted to
learn that Emma told her husband about the affair, not on the previous evening,
but four years earlier.
Thus, during the last two years of the liaison, Jerry was deceived into believing
that Robert was ignorant of his and Emma's infidelity--a deception sustained by
both Jerry's best friend and his lover. "[You didn't know very much about
anything, really, did you?" Robert notes contemptuously, summing up Pinter's
view of the painful contrast between the intimacy we imagine we share with
others, and the real abysses of ignorance that separate us.

These facts and this perspective having been established, Pinter turns the clock
backwards, taking us to a succession of scenes involving Jerry, Emma, and
Robert in which we observe the subtle ways their social behavior is warped by
their hidden knowledge about each other.
Thus, during lunch together, with Robert knowing about his wife's affair, but
Jerry not knowing that Robert knows, the two friends begin to discuss literature:
ROBERT: You know what you and Emma have in common? You love
literature. . . . It gives you both a thrill.
JERRY: You must be pissed.
ROBERT: Really? You mean you don't think it gives Emma thrill?
JERRY: How do I know? She's your wife. (Pause)
ROBERT: Yes. Yes. You're quite right. I shouldn't have to consult you. I
shouldn't have to consult anyone.

While seeming to discuss books, Robert is really talking about sexual betrayal.
Jerry, of course, doesn't know this, and is thus himself being betrayed during the
conversation. Such moments characterize virtually every scene in the play,
creating a deeply disturbing portrait of human beings as strangers under the
skin, unacknowledged adversaries among whom the appearance of intimacy or
shared experience really conceals a perilous emotional terrain of hostility and
lies.
The last scene in the play creates what is perhaps the strongest impression of
this emotional minefield. The time is 1968, and the setting is Robert and
Emma's bedroom. Jerry has retreated there during a party, certain that Emma
will enter the room, and drunkenly determined to declare his love for her. When
she does finally show up, Jerry announces his passion, and kisses her ardently,
twice. At which point Robert enters the room, and is greeted by Jerry with a
grand announcement:

JERRY: As you are my best and oldest friend . . . I decided to take this
opportunity to tell your wife how beautiful she was . . . . And how wonderful for
you that this is so. . . .
ROBERT: Quite Right (Jerry moves to Robert and takes hold of his elbow.)
JERRY: I speak as your oldest friend. Your best man.
ROBERT: You are, actually. (He clasps Jerry's shoulder, briefly, turns, leaves
the room.
Emma moves towards the door. Jerry grabs her arm. she stops still. They stand
still, looking at each other.)

Out of this moment of inextricably mingled affection and treason, honesty and
deceit, will grow the bitter complex of betrayals whose consequences we
already know.

We should also note that the reverse-order presentation of events in this plot
actually mimics the way we come to terms with experience: we grasp the
meaning of the present moment by looking backwards to what produced it. The
movement of our minds, in other words, is more like the movement of Pinter's
plot than like the conventional forward exposition of realistic drama.

IV. THE CHARACTERS

Jerry, Robert, and Emma are the only significant characters in the play.
Jerry seems to be the most naive or ingenuous of the three, declaring in the first
scene that he feels irritation at hearing gossip about the affair between Casey
and Emma because "nobody gossiped about us like that in the old days. . . .
Nobody knew."
However, as we discover, Robert knew; and perhaps Judith, Jerry's wife knew
as well--a possibility strongly suggested by both Robert and Emma in the course
of the play. Thus, Jerry takes on some of the attributes of a certain kind of fool,
or buffoon--a man who, failing to see himself as others see him, misjudges his
own place in the world. His profession as a literary agent suggests a self that is
built on the success of others rather than on the articulation of his own voice or
vision. Working for and through his clients, Jerry has a somewhat feebly
developed understanding of his own identity.
Robert seems far more adept than Jerry at both concealment and perception--
the fundamental skills in dealing with dishonest fellow humans. Thus, he carries
on for years with other women without his "best man" ever catching on. As
Jerry says when he learns of Robert's infidelities, "What a funny thing. We were
such close friends, weren't we? . . . I never even gleaned . . . I never suspected."
Neither did he ever suspect Robert's knowledge of his and Emma's affair.
Robert seems somewhat more hidden, more mysterious than Jerry, and more
aware of the unseen currents in intimate relationships. This lends him a certain
authority in the play, a quality reflected in his profession. As a publisher of
books, Robert has the kind of direct power over others that Jerry, the agent,
lacks.
We see Robert's powers of perception in Scene 5, where he discovers Emma's
unfaithfulness while they are visiting Venice. Robert tells Emma about his visit
to the American Express office, where a clerk informed him that there was a
letter waiting for his wife, and asked if Robert himself would like to pick it up.
The letter, as it turns out, is from Jerry, and is the piece of evidence that reveals
the adulterous relationship.
"To be honest, I was amazed that they suggested I take it," Robert tells Emma.
"I mean, just because my name is Downs and your name is Downs doesn't mean
that we're the Mr and Mrs Downs that they . . . assume we are. We could be,
and in fact are vastly more likely to be, total strangers. . . . That's what stopped
me taking it . . . the thought that I could very easily be a total stranger." It is this
perception of the fundamental strangement between him and his wife--the kind
of insight Jerry never achieves about his relationships--that marks Robert as a
cynically discerning and rather bitter figure in the play.
Emma is, in some ways, the most active of the three characters. It is she who
initiates the opening meeting with Jerry in the pub, she who seems to precipitate
the ending of their affair, and she who moves from the literary agent, Jerry, to
the successful author,
Casey, in her pursuit of emotional satisfaction.
Her role as catalyst of the action is enriched by the enigmatic nature of her
character.
Like the people in Pinter's earlier works, she is a figure surrounded by question
marks.
We wonder why she never tells Jerry that Robert knows about their relationship;
we puzzle over her change of mind about her new lover, Casey, whose work
and character she once despised; and, like Robert, we question whether she was
truly ignorant of her husband's infidelities, as she claims to Jerry in the first
scene.
Emma is thus a fascinating example of purposeful behavior underlain by
obscure motives, of that combination of the known and the unknown, the
familiar and the strange, that Pinter sees in all the people who populate his
plays. As the owner of an art gallery, Emma deals in images and appearances--a
profession distinctly different from the word-based occupations of her husband
and lovers. Her own mysterious image seems somehow beyond words.

V. THE THEMES

Many critics have commented on the implications of the various betrayals in
this play.
Two in particular are worth citing here.

Jack Kroll, writing in Newsweek in 1980, asserts that, "Betrayal is the name of
the game.
Not only in Harold Pinter's . . . play but, he implies, everywhere that 'civilized'
people connect with one another. In every human covenant . . . there is an
unwritten betrayal clause that sooner or later is invoked." Thus, as Kroll
suggests, Pinter is presenting a vision of life with a quality of "bruised
melancholy at its core," a tragicomic view that all our efforts to touch and hold
each other amount to little more than the embrace of shadows.
Jeff Smith of the San Diego Reader cites a friend who "claims to have identified
thirteen acts of betrayal in the play." In addition to the personal betrayals among
Jerry, Robert, Emma, Julia, and Casey, there are professional betrayals, as when
Robert promotes the less talented Casey at the expense of the more gifted
Spinks. According to Smith, this amounts to a betrayal of literature itself. More
abstractly, every character is betrayed by memory (where exactly did Jerry toss
Emma's daughter, Charlotte, up in the air?; what color was Emma's wedding
dress?), and ultimately by the very nature of human relationships.
As Smith reminds us:
Kierkegaard said: 'Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived
forward.' . . . The movement is from age to youth, experience to innocence,
disillusion to illusion. The future serves as a prologue to the present. In effect,
for the audience the play's ending combines tomorrow with today. Instead of a
flashback, in the final scene as Jerry protests his love to Emma . . . we
experience a flash-forward and see the complete arc of the affair at once. The
heartfelt vows and heated passions will coll almost . . . to indifference, and we
come to realize . . . that the real betrayer of all mortal longings is time.