The setting, by Ian MacNeil, puts its chips in the temporal pot. Nichols keeps the play in its era (1968-77), as is essential. The brilliance of the device, of course, is that the immediate vista of the malaise of the end has the effect of putting us in a superior position to these characters, whose youthful hoping and grouping, their forced tolerance and oblique confrontation, grow only more pathetic with the passing of the years. Actually, 'Betrayal,' which was filmed in 1983 using Pinter's own screenplay, moves backward and forward, but its forward movements are lurches of a few hours, days or months, while its reversals are longer, measured and inevitable. The late Pinter based his 1978 play on his real-life affair with Joan Bakewell, a British TV presenter, and the play is famous for its backward chronology. Thus is evoked a perfect Pinter-esque paradox, making the case that 'Betrayal' is not so far removed from Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' soon also to be revived on Broadway, just a couple of blocks away. Of course, he has no complaint under the terms of this illicit relationship, and given that he wants his own unseen wife to know nothing, he is trapped by the very terms he himself has dictated. And thus the betrayer, as Spall evokes by resorting to palpable schoolboy-like indignation, is betrayed. It's in this sad love-nest - Lord, must we all go to die in such places? - that the play's best moment takes place, when Emma must tell Jerry she is pregnant, by her husband. There she uses a tablecloth she brings back from a trip to Venice with her husband and the father of her children,

Spall's performance is sophisticated enough that, crucially, the audience is fooled along with Emma, an adulteress who, in one of those weird paradoxes so easily embraced, actually wants to create a kind of shadow domesticity in the lovers' rented London flat. 'I don't think we don't love each other,' is all he can manage when called by his wearied lover for an accounting of true feeling.

Betrayal harold pinter play