Product Description
Full cast recording of a theatrical play read by Eric Stoltz, Simon Templeman, and Caroline Goodall. One of Pinter's most fascinating plays, this superior drama charts a doomed love triangle backwards through time. More than a study in style this astonishing story is a passionate, mysterious play about memory, illusion and love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

crisp and magical
it was the first work by Harold Pinter that i read. true to his name Pinter creates puny silences and vivid pauses that say more about their characters and their inner drama than the words they utter. Pinter taeches no moral lesson. He only presents the inner turmoil, the utter helplessness , and the void inside his characters. for its literary merits the work can just be called PINTERESQUE.

Short, somewhat cryptic scenes from a marriage.
This is a play about three people - Jerry, Robert and Emma. Emma's married to Robert but has a long affair with Jerry. They are sophisticated, upper class, white people in England in the 1970's. The play is about Jerry's hooking up with Emma over a period of years, the fact of Robert finding out, and the ending of their marriage, for possibly unrelated reasons, some time later. Oh yeah, and it's told in reverse chronological order.

It's a spare play. I don't know if I'd call it minimalist. There are only three characters, aside from a waiter. The don't do a whole lot. The dialogue has the patented Pinter style, like a tennis ball going from side to side without ever hitting the ground:

Jerry - What do you want to do then?
PAUSE
Emma - I don't know what we are doing, any more, that's all.
Jerry - Mmnn.
PAUSE
Emma - Can you actually remember when we were last here?
Jerry - In the summer was it?
Emma - Well, was it?
Jerry - I know it seems -
Emma - It was the beginning of September.
...

It's 138 pages of that.

Pinter's won the Nobel prize and he's one of the most influential playwrights of the late 20th century and this is considered one of his greatest achievements. IMHO though, I found it lifeless, and the reverse chronological plot gimmicky.

Bingo
Sometimes you hit a triple but everyone remembers it as a homer. Pinter has this sort of luck. "Betrayal" is a good play, don't get me wrong. It is somewhat worrying to me that theatre-goers see this as a great play. Great? To be compared to, say, "Hamlet"? It's a good play. The backward plot device is clever and useful and fun. It's delicious in that the betrayal is all done in that wonderful English fashion of brittle humor, lots of contained pain, and no passion. It's all done in exquisitely good taste. Razor burns, not gouged eye-balls. Pinter, who began his career putting the lower-middle class on stage, with their "cuppa" teas and bad breath, has moved here into the upper-middle class, with their Italian wines and weekends to France. Pinter is one of the most upwardly mobile playwrights in theater history. Refinement is as worthy a subject, surely, as degradation, he seems to be saying and, by golly, I guess he's right.

Still Amazing
This play is still one of the best contemporary plays available.I just re-read it and am amazed at how the language and human mystery remain riveting.Remarkable.

Yeah, okay...
The book is poorly bound, and the content is rather dull after all.I think Pinter is over-rated. ... Read more