Stephanie Gamarra Wäntig 27^th of December, 2005

Group: A

The play,

“Betrayal”

The play “Betrayal” was written by the famous playwright Harold Pinter. This play was first published in 1978 by the editorial Faber and Faber.

In this particular play there only three character which are all as important as the other who are, Emma, Robert and Jerry. Emma is a 38 year old woman who is married to Robert and has two children with him, Charlotte and Ned. During her marriage she had an affair with her husband’s best friend and best man in her wedding, Jerry. This particular character is quite sneaky and not much of a stable person as we can see throughout the play. Later on, Emma and Robert divorce because both her and her husband had other love affairs, which in Emma’s case was Casey. Robert is a 40 year old man who is married to Emma. In spite of his wife’s infidelity, which he learns later on in the play as the play rewinds back in time. Robert’s job consists in giving money to promote new novels of writers, which are discovered by Jerry. This character is an easy going, laid back type of guy who doesn’t let anything bother him. We can see this when he finds out that his wife is cheating on him, he didn’t do anything or say anything to his wife or to Jerry. Jerry is a 40 year old man who is married to Judith and also has two children, Sam and Sarah. This character is very sweet and sensitive guy, as we can see in the scene when he is alone with Emma. He as well as Emma betrays Robert as a friend and Emma as a wife.

The play tells the story in little fragments starting from the end (the past) to the present the story of this love triangle. The play starts of in the spring of 1977. In this scene Emma and Jerry have reunited after two years since their affair. She tells Jerry that Robert and her were separating because she found out that her husband had a love affair with another women as well as she did, with Casey. She also tells Jerry that she finally told Robert about the love affair she had back then with Jerry. In the second scene, later during that year Jerry meets with Robert to talk about the love affair he had with Emma, although Robert didn’t mind at all and they both talked calmly. In the next scenes time goes back to 1975 when Emma and Jerry were having their love affair which they end up putting it to an end. The third scene until the ninth scene tells the story of how this love affair started, or betrayal began.

This play takes place in many spaces: the first scene takes place in a pub, and the other scenes following the first scene take place in Jerry’s house, Emma’s and Jerry’s house, Emma’s and Robert’s house, in a hotel in Venice, and in a restaurant. All these places are closed spaces and very simple due to the fact that there aren’t described.

The time in which the play takes place is quite peculiar. There are a lot of time ellipses which mark all of the nine scenes. From the first scene to the second scene the time goes by from present and on, but when we reach the third scene time starts going from present to past. In total, 9 years pass by throughout the play.

The language of this play, which is very common in Pinter’s plays, is quite simple although in some scenes there are some colloquial dialogues between characters which it makes it easier for the reader to understand. The play is written in verse.

Anther aspect that I can add is the technical difficulties that this play can have. Due to the fact that the stage changes a lot, it would be very expensive to by all the appropriate objects, furniture and decoration to fit all the settings of each scene.

In my opinion, this play was very entertaining. I think that this play was very interesting due to the time ellipsis. In the beginning it was quite difficult to follow, but once I understood these leaps in time, I just thought how original this play was. Another reason why I liked this play was because of the drama that made it interesting a enjoyable.