Cinematic Fidelity and the Forms of Pinter’s Betrayal

Abstract

Pinter’s characters in Betrayal are boring. Preoccupied with children, home, extramarital affairs, tablecloths, and happiness, they recite the lines that have been assigned to them as educated, pampered, polite, moderately cultivated, upper-middle-class Londoners. Even their taste in modern literature is as unexceptional as it is predictable. Though they may occasionally feel obliged to read Yeats on Torcello or to take their summer holidays in the Lake District, what they really enjoy are the mundane little novels about ordinary people much like themselves in “the new Casey or Spinks.”¹ Here everything is ordered, fixed, and, above all, contained. Life does not pass these people by; it merely goes on for them. “Betrayal” is in this context a rather lofty word for such bourgeois and unimaginative infidelities. For Pinter’s people in this play only think there is depth to their passions: though their lives are not exactly meaningless, the fact is they are not especially interesting. What is there about this trio, then, that compels us to study in detail every move they make as we reconstruct their sad, sometimes comic, and always ironic chronicle for who-did-what-to-whom, when, where, and under-what-circumstances? To answer these questions we must first take a hard look at some of the dramatic forms Pinter employs so skillfully in this work.