Betrayal (Donmar)

Harold Pinter’s 1978 drama Betrayal, like the two major plays that precede it, No Man’s Land and Old Times, is a study in memory and friendship, with the central relationship of a seven-year long affair between a married woman and her husband’s best friend recollected in hostility, and in reverse.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think Peter Hall’s original production at the National flagged up the dates of each scene. Roger Michell’s new version certainly does, reminding us that although the play starts two years after the affair ended and reels backwards to the fateful encounter at a party in 1968, it also shuffles forwards a couple of times, giving an elasticity to the action and a challenge to your involvement, which is brilliantly engaged by Pinter’s urgently deft writing.

We now know, of course, that the play is based on the real-life affair Pinter enjoyed with television presenter Joan Bakewell, then the wife of his best friend Michael Bakewell, the TV producer. The characters are transplanted in Jerry, a literary agent, Emma and her husband Robert, a publisher. Jerry and Emma meet in a pub at noon. We track them backwards to the love-nest in Kilburn, a flat they maintained for their afternoon trysts, sadly devoid of their passion.

The pivot of the play is the 1971 trip of Robert and Emma to Venice, where he collects a letter for her from American Express and recognises his best friend’s handwriting. Jerry, confident that the affair has been conducted with faultless discretion, never knew – now learns – that Robert knew about it for over half of its duration. Robert himself has had several affairs. The marriage is broken, which is why Emma has asked to meet Jerry in the pub.

In the end, friendship abides, just about, which is Pinter’s main theme. Some commentators detect an even deeper friendship between Robert and Jerry than between either of them with Emma. I’m not sure about this. There are just different levels of connection, and the various voltages are beautifully suggested in Roger Michell’s subtle and quick production, which has a dream cast.

Toby Stephens as Jerry and Samuel West as Robert are exactly the right sort of young forty-ish age, and Dervla Kirwan, the bewitching Irish actress from True Kiss Dare and Ballykissangel on television, has the ideal slow and steady serenity that absorbs the emotional punches while irradiating both pain and pleasure at their memory. She brought a lace tablecloth from Venice for the spartan apartment. She lays it out with love like a votive offering and now contemplates the bareness of the table with a shattering sense of loss.

Stephens exudes all the raffish, boyish charm that is his trademark while adding new notes of frailty and aghast surprise at the unravelling. West is as dry as a biscuit, as clipped as a neat suburban hedge, but he breaks down mightily over lunch with Robert, glugging his wine with vengeful dedication.

The affair has done more than hasten the end of his marriage; it has completely undermined their friendship. Michell’s speedy production (90 minutes, no interval) is abetted by William Dudley’s design of white curtains, moving rapidly around the scenes like hospital screens on an emergency ward where life is draining away, inevitably and inexorably.

- Michael Coveney