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THE PLAYWRIGHT.
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Widely regarded as "the most gifted playwright in England" and "Britain's most significant playwright since Bernard Shaw," Harold Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, a working-class district of London. For more about Harold Pinter, see here.
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THE SETTING.
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Betrayal takes place in various locations, mostly in London, between the years 1968 and 1977. The London locations include a pub, an Italian restaurant, an apartment rented by Jerry and Emma for their adulterous afternoons, a room in Jerry's house, and the living-room and bedroom of the house belonging to Emma and her husband, Robert—who is Jerry's best friend. There is one scene that takes place outside of London, in a hotel room in Venice during a holiday trip taken by Emma and Robert. These settings are contemporary, urban, generally upscale, revealing the affluent, professional nature of the lives of these three characters.
More important than the physical locations, however, is the temporal "setting." The first scene of the play takes place in 1977, the last in 1968. Thus, the play moves generally backwards in time, from the end of Jerry and Emma's affair to its beginning. This counter-clockwise presentation of events results in one of the strongest dramatic qualities of the play: the audience's ironic knowledge in almost every scene of what is going to happen to these people next in their lives. For example, near the end of the play, as we watch Jerry and Ellen have the first afternoon rendezvous in their hideaway flat, we are aware that all this enthusiasm and pleasure will end six years later in disappointment and—the central preoccupation of the play—betrayal. |
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THE PLOT.
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The play begins in 1977 as Jerry and Ellen meet for a drink in a London Pub after not having seen each other for two years. Their last meeting marked the end of a seven-year-long adulterous affair, which began in 1968—not long after Emma's marriage to Robert—and ended in 1975. Robert and Jerry, we soon learn, are best friends, Jerry having served as best man at Robert's wedding.
Jerry asks whether Emma has been having an affair with Casey, a writer for whom he serves as literary agent. Her ambiguous reply leads Jerry to believe that she has. Emma then informs Jerry that she has invited him to this meeting because she and Robert had decided the night before to get a divorce. She tells Jerry that Robert has been unfaithful to her for many years with several different women, and she also informs Jerry that she has told Robert about their affair during the course of the previous evening's conversation. The first scene thus ends with a disturbing portrait of numerous lives simultaneously bound together and divided by infidelity and dishonesty. The second scene compounds this impression. Jerry arranges to talk to Robert about Emma's confession. On meeting with Robert, Jerry is flabbergasted to learn that Emma told her husband about their affair, not on the previous evening, but four years earlier. Thus, during the last two years of the liaison, Jerry was deceived into believing that Robert was ignorant of his and Emma's infidelity—a deception sustained by both Jerry's best friend and his lover. "[Y]ou didn't know very much about anything, really, did you?" Robert notes contemptuously, summing up Pinter's view of the painful contrast between the intimacy we imagine we share with others, and the real abysses of ignorance that separate us. These facts and this perspective having been established, Pinter turns the clock backwards, taking us to a succession of scenes involving Jerry, Emma, and Robert in which we observe the subtle ways their social behavior is warped by their hidden knowledge about each other. Thus, during lunch together, with Robert knowing about his wife's affair, but Jerry not knowing that Robert knows, the two friends begin to discuss literature: ROBERT: You know what you and Emma have in common? You love literature. . . . It While seeming to discuss books, Robert is really talking about sexual betrayal. Jerry, of course, doesn't know this, and is thus himself being decieved during the conversation.
Such moments characterize virtually every scene in the play, creating a deeply disturbing portrait of human beings as strangers under the skin, unacknowledged adversaries among whom the appearance of intimacy or shared experience really conceals a perilous emotional terrain of hostility and lies. The last scene in the play creates what is perhaps the strongest impression of this emotional minefield. The time is 1968, and the setting is Robert and Emma's bedroom. Jerry has retreated there during a party, certain that Emma will enter the room, and drunkenly determined to declare his love for her. When she does finally show up, Jerry announces his passion, and kisses her ardently, twice. At which point Robert enters the room, and is greeted by Jerry with a grand announcement: JERRY: As you are my best and oldest friend . . . I decided to take this opportunity to Out of this moment of inextricably mingled affection and treason, honesty and deceit, will grow the bitter complex of betrayals whose consequences we already know.
We should also note that the reverse-order presentation of events in this plot actually mimics the way we come to terms with experience: we grasp the meaning of the present moment by looking backwards to what produced it. The movement of our minds, in other words, is more like the movement of Pinter's plot than like the conventional forward exposition of realistic drama. |
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THE CHARACTERS.
Jerry, Robert, and Emma are the most important characters in the play.
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Jerry is marked by ingenuousness and naivete, showing in the first scene that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. There he declares that he feels irritation at hearing gossip about the affair between Casey and Emma because "nobody gossiped about us like that in the old days. . . . Nobody knew." However, as we discover, Robert knew; and perhaps Judith, Jerry's wife, knew as well—a possibility strongly suggested by both Robert and Emma in the course of the play. And if they knew, we are tempted to wonder who else might have been privy to Jerry and Emma’s “secret.”
Thus, Jerry takes on some of the attributes of a certain kind of fool, or buffoon—the character who fails to know himself, a kind of highbrow Bertie Wooster. His profession as a literary agent suggests a self that is built on the success of others rather than on the articulation of his own voice or vision. Working for and through his clients, Jerry has a somewhat feebly developed understanding of his own identity. Robert seems far more adept than Jerry at both concealment and perception--the fundamental skills in dealing with dishonest fellow humans. Thus, he carries on for years with other women without his "best man" ever catching on. As Jerry says when he learns of Robert's infidelities, "What a funny thing. We were such close friends, weren't we? . . . I never even gleaned . . . I never suspected." Neither did he ever suspect Robert's knowledge of his and Emma's affair. Robert seems somewhat more hidden, more mysterious than Jerry, and more aware of the unseen currents in intimate relationships. This lends him a certain authority in the play, a quality reflected in his profession. As a publisher of books, Robert has the kind of direct power over others that Jerry, the agent, lacks. We see Robert's powers of perception in Scene 5, where he discovers Emma's unfaithfulness while they are visiting Venice. Robert tells Emma about his visit to the American Express office, where a clerk informed him that there was a letter waiting for his wife, and asked if Robert himself would like to pick it up. The letter, as it turns out, is from Jerry, and is the piece of evidence that reveals the adulterous relationship. "To be honest, I was amazed that they suggested I take it," Robert tells Emma. "I mean, just because my name is Downs and your name is Downs doesn't mean that we're the Mr and Mrs Downs that they . . . assume we are. We could be, and in fact are vastly more likely to be, total strangers. . . . That's what stopped me taking it . . . the thought that I could very easily be a total stranger." It is this perception of the fundamental estrangement between him and his wife--the kind of insight Jerry never achieves about his relationships--that marks Robert as a cynically discerning and rather bitter figure in the play. Emma is, in some ways, the most active of the three characters. It is she who initiates the opening meeting with Jerry in the pub, she who seems to precipitate the ending of their affair, and she who moves from the literary agent, Jerry, to the successful author, Casey, in her pursuit of emotional satisfaction. Her role as catalyst of the action is enriched by the enigmatic nature of her character. Like the people in Pinter's earlier works, she is a figure surrounded by question marks. We wonder why she never tells Jerry that Robert knows about their relationship; we puzzle over her change of mind about her new lover, Casey, whose work and character she once despised; and, like Robert, we question whether she was truly ignorant of her husband's infidelities, as she claims to Jerry in the first scene. Emma is thus a fascinating example of purposeful behavior underlain by obscure motives, of that combination of the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, that Pinter sees in all the people who populate his plays. As the owner of an art gallery, Emma deals in images and appearances--a profession distinctly different from the word-based occupations of her husband and lovers. Her own mysterious image seems somehow beyond words. |
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THEMES.
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Many critics have commented on the implications of the various betrayals in this play. Two in particular are worth citing here.
Jack Kroll, writing in Newsweek in 1980, asserts that, "Betrayal is the name of the game. Not only in Harold Pinter's . . . play but, he implies, everywhere that 'civilized' people connect with one another. In every human covenant . . . there is an unwritten betrayal clause that sooner or later is invoked." Thus, as Kroll suggests, Pinter is presenting a vision of life with a quality of "bruised melancholy at its core," a tragicomic view that all our efforts to touch and hold each other amount to little more than the embrace of shadows. Jeff Smith of the San Diego Reader cites a friend who "claims to have identified thirteen acts of betrayal in the play." In addition to the personal betrayals among Jerry, Robert, Emma, Julia, and Casey, there are professional betrayals, as when Robert promotes the less talented Casey at the expense of the more gifted Spinks. According to Smith, this amounts to a betrayal of literature itself. More abstractly, every character is betrayed by memory (where exactly did Jerry toss Emma's daughter, Charlotte, up in the air? what color was Emma's wedding dress?), and ultimately by the very nature of human relationships. As Smith reminds us: Kierkegaard said: 'Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.' . . . The movement is from age to youth, experience to innocence, disillusion to illusion. The future serves as a prologue to the present. In effect, for the audience the play's ending combines tomorrow with today. Instead of a flashback, in the final scene as Jerry protests his love to Emma . . . we experience a flash-forward and see the complete arc of the affair at once. The heartfelt vows and heated passions will cool almost . . . to indifference, and we come to realize . . . that the real betrayer of all mortal longings is time. |
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
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1. Why didn't Emma tell Jerry that Robert knew about their affair?
2. Why didn't Robert tell Jerry that he knew about Jerry's affair with Emma? 3. Do you think Emma knew about Robert's many infidelities before the night they decided to get a divorce? 4. Do you think that Robert and Jerry will continue to be friends? 5. Why do you think Robert and Emma have decided to get a divorce? 6. Have you had any friendships in which you withheld important information from a friend? Have you had such information withheld from you? 7. Do you think people ever really know each other? 8. Do you think total honesty is possible in relationships among friends and family members? 9. Is it better to be somewhat dishonest in order to preserve a relationship, or to be totally truthful and risk its destruction? 10. Which character seems most honest? Most dishonest? Why? |