Mind Games

BETRAYAL is a chess match masquerading as a play: Harold Pinter's latest occasion for us to play mind games with his characters. These characters are Emma (Jenny Agutter), her husband Robert (Paul Benedict), and his best friend Jerry (Richard Jordan '60), and the situation is a seven-year affair between Jerry and Emma. In Robert, Emma and Jerry we have intellectuals creating worlds in their heads to avoid the consequences of their behavior. They think they can limit the moral dimensions of their actions by controlling the flow of information.

Pinter abandons the usual tools for needling and prodding an audience into adopting new ideas. His story does not unfold slowly, but weaves backwards, beginning in 1977 and ending in '68 (the skips are irregular: this is not a "flash back each year on Christmas to see how far they've come" manipulation of time). There are no dramatic peaks and valleys, no aesthetically pleasing beginning, middle and end. Gone, too, are the conventional techniques of characterization. Real people, with blood running through their veins, would detract from Pinter's concern with the purely intellectual. Jerry, Emma and Robert are as colorless as the gray business suits, black dresses and Burburry raincoats that fill their wardrobes. The stage is equally stark, lest a trinket or painting leak evidence of a character's personality--the stage is even more bare than it was on Broadway: a simple table and chairs replace Jerry's cushy leather study, and the bartender in scene one has vanished altogether. Pinter takes great pains to insure we will not allow intuitive trust in characters, a whimsical fancy for personality or taste, to prevent us from continually picking apart and putting together their motivations and actions.

BECAUSE IT IS the audience's and not the actors' job to analyze characters, actors as competent as Agutter, Benedict and Jordan face a frustrating task. Pinter withholds from them even conversation as an outlet for creative interpretation. The dialogue is slow and choppy, meant to give the audience information without letting word choice and phrasing reveal additional insight into the speakers. Characters rarely utter more than four words at a time, and there are precious few monologues. Benedict, Jordan and Agutter too often let the unexpected eye contact, the strained embrace, the angry removal of a tablecloth do the audience's work of interpretation.

But in those moments when Pinter permits his characters to behave like familiar people, feeds them flowing dialogue and critical musings, the actors excel. Jordan is charmingly lost as he flirts with Emma, mourning his painful life as the prince of emptiness ruling over the state of Catatonia. Appropriately bemused, Benedict describes the ritual squash game which precedes the ritual "winner buys" lunch. Agutter's role is most difficult, for she is not given such an opportunity to step away from her job as walking chess piece. Only in the early love scenes with Jerry can she display any character at all, and there she can only laugh and sparkle, flaunt her yellow shirt and red skirt that are the only bright colors we see all evening.

Pinter has chosen characters who dwell comfortably in the intellectual world: editors of literary magazines at Oxford and Cambridge, publishers of books, people who include Yeats in their suitcases when packing for vacation. Such characters allow him to demonstrate larger truths about the place of the intellect in friendship and love, particularly when it rationalizes away responsibility. Jerry has no guilt over his affair with Emma until it is long-finished, when Emma tells him over a drink that Robert knows. "But he is my best friend," Jerry whines, as if confronting the fact for the first time. By moving the time scheme around Jerry's intellectual castle building, Pinter begs us to consider how differently we would view a scene had he given it to us in chronological order. He forces us to recognize that we are playing similar games in our judgments of the characters, and so demonstrates what every good storyteller knows--that once a fact is loosed, it changes our assessment of what has come before. It colors our opinion of characters, and makes us reevaluate just who is doing the betraying.

All of this does little more than elegantly demonstrate a truth about ourselves. By anticipating and reconstructing the action before us, we become Pinter's partners in chess. But it is the playwright's job to be more than a play-mate. He should tell us that we only live once and should therefore sleep with our best friends' wives, or let us know that it is wrong to manipulate friendships by manipulating facts. Pinter has laid the groundwork for such conclusions, but we still await them.