Betrayal
Oct 2013 · Faber & Faber
5.0star
2 reviewsreport
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128
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About this ebook
'Betrayal is a new departure and a bold one . . . Pinter has found a way of making memory active and dramatic, giving an audience the experience of the mind's accelerating momentum as it pieces together the past with a combination of curiosity and regret. He shows man betrayed not only by man, but by time - a recurring theme which has found its proper scenic correlative . . . Pinter captures the psyche's sly manoeuvres for self-respect with a sardonic forgiveness . . . a master craftsman honouring his talent by setting it new, difficult tasks' New Society
'There is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some kind of blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . Pinter's narrative method takes "what's next?" out of the spectator's and replaces it with the rather deeper "how?" and "why?" Why did love pass? How did these people cope with the lies, the evasions, the sudden dangers, panic and the contradictory feelings behind their own deftly engineered masks? The play's subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.' The Times
First staged at the National Theatre in 1978, Betrayal was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 1991. Twenty years after its first showing, it returned to the National in 1998.
'There is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some kind of blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . Pinter's narrative method takes "what's next?" out of the spectator's and replaces it with the rather deeper "how?" and "why?" Why did love pass? How did these people cope with the lies, the evasions, the sudden dangers, panic and the contradictory feelings behind their own deftly engineered masks? The play's subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.' The Times
First staged at the National Theatre in 1978, Betrayal was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 1991. Twenty years after its first showing, it returned to the National in 1998.
Ratings and reviews
5.0
2 reviews
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September 9, 2017
I have to read this as part of my MSc in playwriting. It is the first play I have chosen to read from the list. It's short. I would love to see how this translates to the stage because of the way it time travels back and forth. Its a clever way of ebbing and flowing - giving the information to the audience. I guess in the way an affair ebbs and flows over the years. I think a lot of it may be based on his own experience of an affair simply by the way it all rolls out as if we are meant to have stumbled upon a vignette of real life. He makes no apology for his minimal plot, it is simply that this happened over a period of about four years and he wants us to know about it. Three ordinary people, but we learn a lot about them in 90 short pages
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About the author
Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. He lived with Antonia Fraser from 1975 and they married in 1980. In 1995 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize, awarded for a lifetime's achievement in literature. In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre. In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the same year, the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry and the Franz Kafka Award (Prague). In 2006 he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize and, in 2007, the highest French honour, the Légion d'honneur. He died in December 2008.
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