Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978.This play is like if the phrase “God is dead” was a command. Betrayal is a play that happens twice, once in front of your eyes, once in your head, when you revisit certain scenes to judge their proper weight. A full list of these incandescent moments would take too long to recount. And it is subjective anyway. So here’s one of mine, small enough to miss.
Scene four: drinks at Robert and Emma’s; Emma offstage, with Ned, Jerry and Robert onstage, talking. What we don’t see, but will see later, is that Robert knows about the affair, and Emma knows he knows. What we don’t see, and will never see, is what this means exactly, because she has not given him up, and Robert tolerates this, and so does she – Robert knowing, Jerry not knowing he knows.
Casually Jerry says he will be taking a trip to America. He has not told Emma, and when he leaves it is clear this is devastating news for her. She then turns to Robert for … what? Punishment? Pity? Comfort? Is it possible – that a wife would turn to her husband for solace when her lover casts her off?
God knows. What is true, what makes Betrayal a luciferous study in motivations and consequences, is that Emma loves Jerry. And her love cuts a channel so deep the banks of her life collapse into it. Love is the force that both authorises the betrayals in Betrayal, and makes them devastating and destructive.
I think of Robert like Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, a man who can’t communicate with verbal words though he is a writer. Unlike Jake, he values male friendship over romantic love. When all a play is nothing, it is also a cornerstone for poltical thought.
Humanity is weird