It features a middle-class love-triangle in the form of two men and a woman, Jerry, his best friend Robert and Robert’s wife Emma, who are, as Robert Clyman puts it, ‘stylized variations on characters we already know from the more densely coded genre of realism’. The play marks the transition from the existential enigmas of Pinter’s earlier work to texts that deal with how perception is subjective and memory can be manipulated.So what leads Esslin to call Betrayal a ‘major stylistic change’? In many ways, it is a much more conventional play than Pinter’s earlier works. We cannot even be sure whether Anna is alive or dead, a ghost, a memory or a guilty projection of Kate’s or Deeley’s unconscious. Often paired with Betrayal, Old Times features three characters, Deeley, Anna and Kate, negotiating different versions of their shared past. From the 1970s onwards, with plays such as Old Times (1971), Pinter’s work shifted gear away from absurdist paranoia to tackle questions of memory and its unreliability.
In plays such as (1958), The Caretaker (1960) and (1964), Pinter had offered audiences often working-class characters trapped in threatening scenarios – ‘comedies of menace’ as they were famously dubbed – in which motives were unexplained and violence simmered beneath the surface. OL550880W Page_number_confidence 81.41 Pages 158 Partner Innodata Ppi 300 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20200424123249 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 663 Scandate 20200415030103 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog sfpl Scribe3_search_id 31223011367092 Tts_version 3.Up until that point, Pinter had been firmly associated with the 'Theatre of the Absurd', a term Esslin himself had coined to describe the work of writers such as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco which subverted realism and staged the irrational instead.
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