Betrayal Study Guide

Harold was born to a British Jewish couple in East London in 1930. An only child, Pinter’s loneliness and confusion as a boy was compounded by the experience of the London Blitz, during which he was forced to evacuate the city. He found a sense of confidence during his teenage years at an all-male school, where he began to blossom socially and gained important experience participating in the school plays. This period left him with an abiding faith in the vital importance of male friendship, which would recur as a theme throughout his work. Upon graduation, he was fined for being a conscientious objector to mandatory military service, beginning a lifelong outspoken commitment to leftist politics that came increasingly to the fore in his later years. His first theatrical success was The Birthday Party in 1958, instigating a long and successful career in London. His plays often featured witty and minimalist dialogue with dark existential undercurrents. Pinter married Vivien Merchant in 1956, but the affair he had with BBC broadcaster Joan Bakewell from 1962 to 1969 supplied direct inspiration for Betrayal. He divorced Merchant in 1980 and married Antonia Fraser, with whom he’d already been having another affair since 1977. He and Fraser stayed married until his death in 2008 from liver cancer. Though primarily known as a playwright, Pinter also worked extensively as a screenwriter, stage director, and actor. Though controversial, he was massively praised, culminating in his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

Betrayal was significantly inspired by Pinter’s personal experience of a covert affair with BBC broadcaster Joan Bakewell, from 1969 to 1975. Pinter’s wife, Vivien Merchant, apparently never found out about this affair, as reflected in Judith’s apparent ignorance in the play. Shortly after his affair with Bakewell ended, however, Pinter struck up a new affair with the writer Antonia Fraser, and this one he did not keep secret from his wife. His marriage dissolved, finally terminating in 1980, after which he swiftly married the also recently divorced Fraser. This sent Merchant on an alcoholic spiral that killed her within a few years. This outcome forever alienated Pinter from his son Daniel. Near the time of its premiere, Betrayal was thought to reflect the turbulence surrounding this later affair with Fraser, and it was not until years later that his affair with Bakewell became public and was identified as the real source for Betrayal. Beyond the drama of his personal life, Pinter was as always engaged in leftist political causes in the 1970s, including anti-Apartheid activism and criticism of the Vietnam War. His own political anger perhaps informed his negative depiction of Jerry and Robert’s bourgeois complacency and material comfort.

Betrayal arrived after Pinter’s theatrical eminence had already been established for two decades, beginning with his play The Birthday Party in 1958. That play and Pinter’s subsequent work, like The Dumb Waiter, inspired the critical label “Comedy of Menace.” His early plays earned that title by tending to generate feelings of tension and unease from superficially banal scenarios. The “comedy” would arise from the absurdity and existential uncertainty surrounding the characters’ trivial situations. In this regard, Pinter owed much to the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, whose 1953 hit Waiting for Godot revolutionized 20th-century theater with its minimalism and unique blend of absurdist humor and existential dread. Pinter also cited Franz Kafka as an early influence. Kafka’s works are similarly lauded for their dark, bizarre humor and evocations of human powerlessness. Kafka remained important for Pinter throughout his life: he adapted Kafka’s novel The Trial for the screen in 1993. Betrayal itself belongs to a period beginning in the late 1960s during which Pinter moved on from the so-called “Comedy of Menace” to a series of “Memory Plays,” a term coined by Tennessee Williams to refer to dramas where most of the important action is recounted rather than staged. Old Times and No Man’s Land similarly belong to Pinter’s “Memory Play” period. The theme of memory dominates the work of Marcel Proust, which Pinter had been engaged in adapting just before writing Betrayal. Within Betrayal itself, the characters mention Irish writer W. B. Yeats, whose voluminous output included plays as well as poems, though they bear little stylistic resemblance to Pinter’s work.