Betrayal

'Jerry is a literary agent; Emma runs an art gallery; Robert is a publisher. Emma and Robert are married and Jerry is Robert's best friend, but Emma and Jerry have a seven-year affair and Robert has secrets of his own.'

Thus the flyer for Pinter's Betrayal, at Salisbury Playhouse, and it's all too easy to imagine a terrible play based on it, a middle-class soap opera involving arty people in Hampstead getting in and out of bed with each other. But it's a fascinatingly involving piece, not least for its technique of telling the story backwards, at each regressive step throwing everything into further doubt. What is this love story we are being shown? By the end we see it starts as a drunken declaration and fizzles out in boredom. Was there love along the way? Maybe, yet we are increasingly aware that behind every statement there is an evasion, or a deception. There was certainly desire, with Emma escaping from something and Jerry perhaps avoiding a disconnect  in his own marriage he does not want to address (or perhaps just arrogant enough to think he can have everything). Passion is surrounded by puzzle. Who knew what when? What further deceptions are taking place behind the scenes? Is Emma really just having drinks with Casey? Is Jerry's wife really just friends with her doctor colleague?In whose kitchen was a child thrown and caught? Pinter's trademark silences and pauses are filled with the sound of people searching for a foothold in an emotional landscape of ice and fog.

A capable cast found the drama of the words,  and the gaps between them. Emma (played by Kirsty Besterman - lovely to see her again here after Separate Tables) found a convincing spectrum from cool and controlling to utterly disconsolate. There was a real hint at something nasty not quite being shown in her marriage to Robert (Robert Hands), who seems to accept her affair with icy insouciance and yet exudes real menace. A brooding violence is internalised and expressed in insinuating verbal attack. His speech about squash had the effect of a brutal attack, while the Venice hotel scene projected a palpable tension. Jerry (Robert Mountford) played the lover, pinging like a squash ball between the other two. The Salisbury Playhouse has a very wide stage, and the production made full use of it: this might be thought to work against the intimate nature of the drama, but I thought it actually worked well, the spaces between the actors  bringing out the emotional distances between them, enhanced by ambient sound effects.

Betrayal is based on Pinter's own affair with Joan Bakewell. Rather knowingly, it has jokes about authors writing novels based on their own domestic lives. It has a slight period feel to it now, taking us to a time when we used traveller's cheques, and actually wrote letters to each other. And do literary agents earn so much that they can afford to buy, or rent, a flat in Kilburn purely for the occasional adulterous afternoon? Perhaps easier then than now. Yet it remains fresh, as it is not really about a particular affair, or even romantic affairs at all, but the nature of our dealings with each other, where our knowledge of our lives is only ever partial and every ordinary word casts a long and troubling shadow.