Off-stage, Oliver Driver polarises people in his various roles as Alternative TV station-owner, corporate MC and TV presenter, but in the Silo Theatre production of Pinter’s Betrayal it is clear he is a theatre actor with class.

In Pinter’s intriguingly ambiguous play of morals and manners, Driver gives a sensitive and restrained performance that teases out all the nuances of the script. [More]

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Betrayal is about Emma’s seven-year affair with Jerry, her husband’s best friend. The play begins at the end with Emma and Jerry’s awkward meeting two years after the end of the affair – the last time they saw each other. They attempt to be pleasant. They are, after all, dear friends…

Despite the technique of ravelling the story backwards, there are few surprises, in that the main events are disclosed in the characters’ reminiscing before they are played out on the stage. The point of the reverse chronology isn’t to withhold surprise plot twists, so much as to throw a spotlight onto the way in which people interact when they are withholding secrets, and how they skirt around the issues when they feel guilty or suspicious. None of the three main characters remember things quite as they actually happened.

Jerry is also married, but his wife Judith doesn’t appear in the play, nor do his children, though they are important to the story, as are Robert and Emma’s.

In true Pinter style, so much lies in the long pregnant pauses and the unspoken meaning underlying what is being said. The naturalistically understated dialogue also illuminates the characters’ awkwardness, embarrassment, and takes the audience into a very believable world of mundaneness and compulsion.

The Herald theatre has been arranged to accommodate extra seating along both sides of the stage. Although it was hard to tell from where I was sitting in the main tiered seating, it seemed that the actors’ carefully considered angles would make it watchable from all directions, the reduced stage also lending itself to the intimacy of the play’s many moments of tension.

The interesting thing about this play is that it doesn’t make it easy to decide who to side with. At first it seems to be Robert (played with a satisfying darkness and wry humour by Colin Moy) who has lost face, but his cards aren’t all on the table. Then we discover that the likeable but too smug Jerry (Oliver Driver) is the one who’s been kept in the dark. At least Emma knows where she stands – or does she? The question of who is being betrayed isn’t answered easily. No one is an innocent victim – they each have their secrets.

In typical English fashion, no one gets terribly upset, or at any rate no one shows it. We’re witness to surface ripples hinting at deeper currents. Self preservation has lead them to avoid plumbing the depths, and because of this, to be unable to communicate with directness or sincerity. This discomfort is epitomised in the final scene, describing the first stirrings of the affair, in which Jerry resorts to a plethora of ridiculous clichés to express the feelings he’s so unaccustomed to having.

The three main cast members give equally strong performances, with measured wit and a sensitivity to the layered motivations of their characters. Michelle Langstone captures in Emma the ebbing of a carefree youth giving way to tight-lipped cynicism (shown in reverse) – a woman who has both grown into herself and lost something of herself.

Betrayal goes both ways, every which way, in fact, as they have in a way betrayed themselves as well as each other. At turns frustrating, highly entertaining, and boring, Betrayal is uncomfortably true to life. It made me laugh frequently at the patent absurdity of the way we communicate and left me with something to go away and think about. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer