Raising infidelity to an artform...

BETRAYAL

Oldham Coliseum, to Saturday

HAROLD Pinter’s celebrated semi-autobiographical work in some ways reveals the man behind all those plays, awards and celebrity.

He was a pretty cold fish, for all his sexual conquests and well-documented affairs, determinedly crashing his way through the lives of his friends and acquaintances apparently without much loyalty — though he wasn’t exactly alone in that.

If the fiction is based on more than a whisper of truth, he appeared not to have any friends who weren’t also cheating at some point.

Emma (Rebecca Pownall) is having a seven-year affair with Jerry (Steven Clarke), the best friend of her husband, Robert (Pete Collis). Robert finds out about half way through but is apparently not too concerned since he has affairs too. Emma’s act in admitting the affair is a betrayal of Jerry, since he thought it was a secret. And anyway, his wife is probably seeing someone too…

The short play, about 90 minutes plus an interval, flows in nine fairly short scenes across seven years, and it’s clear that for them, infidelity is something of a sport.

Pinter’s intention is to reveal the betrayals that go on between men and women all the time, not necessarily just the game-changing ones but the small ones too.

He does this with his usual mix of dark humour, silence, high-precision language and quiet savagery, but here he also employs a stage trick: telling the story in reverse.

The first scene shows us Jerry and Emma chatting in 1977 over a drink some time after the affair ends, after which we see its reverse-progress from coolness through increasing passion, admissions and domesticity to the night Jerry first declared his love in 1968.

The writing is, as always with Pinter, clinically smart; each scene seamlessly peels away emotions feelings and friendships to lay the couples emotionally bare. That’s not to say this touring production, by the usually admirable London Classic Theatre, quite matches up to the work.

This might not be great Pinter but the cast of four (Max Wilson plays various waiters) occasionally seems not to be playing the roles but reading them with feeling, on a set contrived to be relatively cheap and representational, but which ends up looking like a bomb site. Which might, of course, be emotionally deliberate…