BETRAYAL:                                                                Virginia Suárez vega

Author: Harold Pinter

Title: Betrayal

Publishing house: Faber and Faber

Publicashed: 1978

Place: London

Characters:

Emma: She is thirty-eight years old. She is married to Robert but she is unfaithful to

him. Robert and Emma have a child, he is five years old. The relationship that she has

got with the other characters is discreet because she had to be careful not to be

discovered by the other characters and specifically by her husband. She is a smart

person and she has to take care of her appearance.

Jerry: He is forty years old. He is married to Judith. They have a child, she is ten years

old. He works as a publisher and he travels a  lot. He is in love with Emma. He met her

a long time ago, but he declared his love to her at a party in 1968. He is Robert’s best

friend.

Robert: He is forty years old. He is married to Emma. He works with Jerry as a

publisher. He betrayed his wife with an other woman for a long time. Jerry is his best

friend. Robert thinks Emma is having an affair another man, Casey. He and Emma

speak about divorce.

The relationship among the characters is good and friendly. They act with naturalness,

as the friends that they are.

Plot:

Emma and Robert are married, they have got a child, he is five years old. Emma betrays

Robert with his best friend, Jerry. He is married to a woman called Judith and they have

a child, she is ten years old. At the beginning Emma said to Jerry that she had confessed

to Robert that she betrayed him. At this point of the play, the plot begins a trip to the

past till the moment that Jerry confesses.

Place and time of plot:

Scene 1: it develops in a restaurant, the characters are seated near a table, in the dinning-

room of the restaurant. It is a closed space.

Scene 2: It develops in Jerry’s home. Jerry sits on the chair. It is a closed space.

Scene 3: It develops in the flat, they are seated. It is a closed space.

Scene 4: It develops in Jerry and Emma’s flat.

Scene 5: It develops in the bedroom of a hotel in Venice. In this scene there appears a

bed and a window.

Scene 6: It develops in the flat.

Scene 7: It develops in a restaurant.

Scene 8: It develops in the flat, it was empty, there was a bottle wine and some glasses.

Scene 9: Jerry and Emma at Robert and Emma’s home.

The play begins at the end of the seventies and it finishes at the end of the sixties, it

lasts nine years.

Literary and stylistic resources:

The characters use a simple and colloquial language. They question their lives a lot.

They use a lot of short statements with pauses in them.

Personal Opinion:

From my point of view, the infidelity is a subject which has never disappeared between

couples. Nowadays, people wonder if your partner will be unfaithful to them when an

other woman or man appears in their lives, however there are people who do not realise

the damage that they can cause their couple, and they are not faithful to them. In my

opinion, if a person is unfaithful to his/her partner is because they are not happy with

them, by contrast, to be unfaithful is the worst thing that you could do.