By Harold Pinter. Directed by Matthew Bissett. An Ensemble Theatre Company production. At the Jericho Arts Centre on Wednesday, July 20. Continues until August 19

Harold Pinter’s Betrayal is about trusting your spouse, friends, and lovers. In some ways, this Ensemble Theatre Company production is about trusting your audience—or not.
Betrayal dissects an extramarital affair. For seven years, Emma and Jerry rent a furnished flat for their afternoon trysts, even though Emma is married to Jerry’s best friend, Robert, and Jerry is married to a woman named Judith. The piece was inspired by Pinter’s own affair with television presenter Joan Bakewell, who was married to Pinter’s friend and professional ally, radio and TV producer Michael Bakewell.

In a masterful device, the chronology of Betrayal moves backwards, starting in 1977, two years after the affair has ended, and arriving in 1968, when it began.

The playwright plays variations on the theme of deception. Jerry decides, for instance, that Robert, whom he has been cuckolding for years, is not a true friend. Who knew exactly what and when did they know it? 

These characters are all British so, of course, they never say exactly what they mean. This elusive subtext and the shifting realities make for some intriguing scenes. And, playing Emma, Corina Akeson does particularly fine work in this Ensemble Theatre Company production. As she has proved playing male characters in Glengarry Glen Ross and The Winter’s Tale, Akeson is an actor of considerable emotional resources. Here, her Emma is complex and entirely credible, a woman who is capable of deep—but provisional—honesty.

Tariq Leslie (Jerry) and James Gill (Robert) also do solid work, although neither fully matches Akeson’s authenticity. And there are significant problems with both the production and the script.

In ham-fisted staging, director Matthew Bissett overexplains the play’s time line. Designer Heipo Leung’s set features a kind of hourglass: sand falls in a small but steady stream from the ceiling into a large glass cylinder on the floor. Okay, the play is about time. But whenever the story shifts backwards chronologically, actor Leslie walks around the falling sand as if worshipping it, and something or other plays in reverse in Paul Fouchard’s sound design. Audiences could have figured out the reversal without this folderol. Bissett also encourages his actors to lean so heavily into their subtext that sometimes it virtually becomes text.

The weakness of the play is surprising. Pinter is a major dramatist and 1978’s Betrayal is considered one of his major works—but it looks dated. In an era of the monogamish, of polyamory and Dan Savage, it is increasingly apparent that, even though Betrayal examines self-deception as well as deception, its success also relies on the glamorization of infidelity, on the acceptance that, especially as intelligent people play the game, infidelity is inherently sophisticated and interesting. As this evening unfolded, however, Betrayal looked more and more like a period piece to me, a play about liars caught in the conventions of their time, people whom I didn’t much like and didn’t much care about.