" What’s past is prologue, " Shakespeare wrote, but not in Betrayal. Harold Pinter’s 1978 play, which Nora Theatre Company is giving a suitably ironic 25th-anniversary revival, does the backstroke through a sea of deceptions large and small, beginning in the aftermath of an extramarital love affair and retreating, in spot-check fashion, to the beginning. Like the plays that immediately preceded it, Old Times and No Man’s Land, Betrayal is about the tricks of memory (Pinter had just finished a screenplay based on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu). It’s also about what the critic Benedict Nightingale calls " the politics of betrayal " (which is by no means limited to the central deception by a wife of her husband) and their collateral damage. The play, which was made into a 1983 film, is a spare cat-and-mouse story, sadder than substantive, but elegantly told. And the Nora production, headed backward toward a birth of love that’s little more halcyon than the autopsy, knows where it’s going.
Betrayal begins, as it did in the playwright’s mind, with " two people at a pub . . . meeting after some time. " Emma and Jerry make polite small talk, under which there flows a current of rue. Lovers for seven years, both married with children, they ended their affair two years earlier. Now Emma tells Jerry that her marriage to his oldest friend, Robert, has come apart and that in the unraveling, she has told him of her long-time liaison with Jerry. This turns out not to be strictly true, as Pinter pulls a series of rugs out from under the assumptions, and recollections, of the play’s three characters, who have all betrayed one another, and on a deeper level themselves, variously across the years.
Unlike the scabrous citizens of Pinter’s earlier comedies of menace, publisher Robert, literary agent Jerry, and art-gallery impresario Emma, discussing books and swilling white wine, are all as erudite and polite as they are treacherous. Robert, though ostensibly the wronged party, is the most cold-blooded and complicitous character; Jerry, on the surface the cad, is the most human. The Nora production bears this out, with Jason Asprey a coolly taut Robert and Joe Pacheco a more relaxed if wary Jerry, whom Robert, fueled partly by pain and partly by perversity, bats around like a mouse. Even more than these two, Anne Gottlieb’s Emma captures the spite-edged ache at the bottom of the deception-poisoned affair, which ends with a whimper and, once we get there, seems to have begun in a bottle.
Despite its structure, the 90-minute piece is more straightforward than most of Pinter’s plays, with its conversation, dotted by precise comic games of one-upmanship, tersely poetic and as pregnant as the pauses. Director Scott Edmiston respects the stylized rhythms, as do the actors, though there were a few shaky moments at the press opening. (That’s the thing about Pinter: it doesn’t want to be realistic, but it does want to be perfect.) Janie Howland’s mostly white, gallery-inspired set, with its triptych of a photographic image seen at decreased distances, is stylish too. Gail Astrid Buckley’s casual yet rich-looking costumes begin with blacks, advance backward to whites and then to muted blues and greens; they end, at passion’s inception, with wine-reds.
Despite the 25th-anniversary theme, Edmiston and his designers chose not to make Betrayal a period piece. A time line in the program sets it between 2002 and 1993, rendering the plot device of an intercepted letter almost silly in this age of cell phones and e-mail. Wherever you set it, Betrayal, which puts such a bleak gleam on such an arguably cliché’d situation, is worth revisiting. Of course, I wouldn’t mind if, once Pinter started hurtling backward, he’d kept going until he got to The Homecoming.