Other reviews of Betrayal also demonstrated the critics’ disap-
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pointment in the face of Pinter’s “deviant” play and disclosed their reluctance to give up the “Pinter” construct. In his review, entitled “Pinter, master of ambiguity, offers a blank statement of the obvious,” Irving Wardle began with a description of the Pinteresque ambience of the first scene, “A man and a woman meet in a bar and start exchanging loaded small-talk about mutual acquaintances […]. Perhaps they were once lovers, or were once married,” and he goes on to comment, “at which point, Pinter halts the game and explains everything.” Wardle implicitly revealed his disappointment in claiming, “In other words, Pinter, the master of ambiguity, has laid out the facts as explicitly as a police witness: and the stark contrast with all his previous work does not end here.” The drama critic of the Sunday Times was more explicit.7 He started by mourning “our expectation,” described Betrayal as “altogether free of those elements we have come to call ‘Pinter7 See the Sunday Times 19 Nov. 1978. The critic writing this notice, like several other critics (such as J. C. Trewin in Punch and Paul Johnson in the Evening Standard), linked Pinter’s Betrayal with Tom Stoppard’s then new play Night and Day, which was first performed a week earlier at the Phoenix theatre. Neither play apparently complied with the playwrights’ devised constructs.
esque’,” pronounced his dislike of the play and declared bluntly, “Betrayal, the work of a man who has lost an empire and not yet found a role, is in its content empty, and on its surface dull.” Yet another reviewer, Sheridan Morley, found the play a “not very strong one” (too predictable), and asserted that
“anyone expecting any of the ambiguity or menace of the earlier Pinters is in for a sharp disappointment.” Unlike these reviews, which illustrate the emergency mode of “denouncing the deviant play”, the following two reviews exemplify, albeit in different ways, another emergency mode – an attempt to maintain the previously devised construct. In his review, Robert Cushman perceived Betrayal as compatible with the “Pinter” construct to the extent that it manifested the playwright’s own attempt to challenge critics and audience alike. Cushman admitted that he suspected the playwright, and commented, “Betrayal might fittingly be re-titled Pinter’s Revenge. I have been accused, he seems to be saying, of withholding the details of my characters’ past lives. This time I will give them to you. Much good may it do you.” Cushman went on to suggest that the play “tricks” its audience and critics alike on various levels: the playwright does not reveal as much as it may seem, and also that “the structure of the play is literally a betrayal, and figuratively as well since it is treasonous to what have been assumed,
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