THEORIES ABOUT TRUTH AND ARTIFICE IN LITERATURE AND THEATRE

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CHAPTER 3: HAROLD PINTER’S KALEIDOSCOPE OF BETRAYALS

The successful lie creates an unnerving freedom. It shows us that it is possible for no one to know what we are doing. The poor lie – the wish to be found out – reveals our fear about what we can do with words. Lying, in other words, is not so much a way of keeping our options open, but of finding out what they are. Fear of infidelity is fear of language. – Adam Phillips, Monogamy (1996)

Introduction

Harold Pinter’s Betrayal poses compelling epistemological questions by presenting the audience with the type of lies to which Phillips (1996) refers in the epigraph above – lies which are successful at first, but become uncovered; revealing not only a series of betrayals, but also the complicated ways in which language is used.
In this chapter I aim to analyse Betrayal in the light of the ideas about language, mimesis, and theatre, discussed in the previous chapter. After a contextualisation of Pinter’s oeuvre, I investigate his use of language and the way the characters use it to negotiate a community with each other or exclude one another from such a community. I also examine the use of recycling and mimicry in the play, both in the characters’ dialogue and as used by Pinter in a broader sense. Lastly, I analyse the use of metatheatre in the play, according to Wolf’s (2009) guidelines in this regard.
This discussion will consequently illuminate the questions concerning authenticity, communication, and implications for the audience and theatre as an art form, posed in Chapter One of this thesis.

Pinter’s influences and influence

Harold Pinter is possibly the most important playwright of his time in the English language. Even so, it is difficult to place him within the dramatic canon. Initially, he was associated with the “Angry Young Men” of the 1950s and compared to the Absurdist playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco (Knowles, 2009:74). Although he was also labelled as a kitchen sink dramatist, Pinter’s plays are not realist. But, like Chekhov, he writes for the proscenium arch (Knowles, 2009:78), which makes it difficult to categorise his oeuvre, as well as pinpoint his cultural influences. Scolnicov (2012:174) contrasts Pinter with Tom Stoppard, “whose work is openly intertextual and intermedial.” But, in an interview with Thompson (2005:45), Pinter states that no writer writes in a vacuum and that playwrights absorb and digest other writing which influences their own work, as his plays are likely to be influenced by Samuel Beckett. According to Scolnicov (2012:174-175), modernist writers such as William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce have also shaped Pinter’s drama.
According to Smith (2005:12-19), there are three important factors arising from Pinter’s childhood and early years that should be kept in mind when interpreting his plays. Firstly, he is Jewish. The claustrophobic domestic relations in most of his plays as well as a tension between working class parents and offspring with artistic and intellectual aspirations stem from this fact. Pinter was in his early teens during the Second World War; this experience left him and his generation convinced of the precariousness of life, the centrality of life to art and culture, the importance of sexuality and friendships, as well as the corruptibility of states, politicians and officials (Smith, 2005:12).
Secondly, Pinter’s “outsiderness,” as Smith (2005:17) terms it, also influences his work. Despite Pinter’s origins on the periphery of institutional education, he is often criticised for his intellectualism. According to Smith (2005:10), this is due to the myopic view of his work held by these critics. Much of Pinter’s intellectual grounding took place outside institutional education; he therefore always remained an intellectual outsider to an extent. He enrolled at RADA in 1948, but found it intolerable and dropped out, although he did serve as Associate Director of the National Theatre from 1972 to 1983. Thus, although he is not an intellectual snob, Pinter is also not an anti-intellectual. He, for example, views the phenomenon of “pop,” or , as he refers to it in an interview with Gross (2005:75), “the quick buck, the quick poem, the quick song, the quick whatever you like” as superficial, fleeting and driven by panic.
What Smith (2005:19) refers to as “a looming sense of doom” is the third important factor shaping Pinter’s drama. Events such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in paranoia, suspicion and a fear of external forces that may never be known. According to Hobson (in Smith, 2005:19), Pinter was living “on the verge of disaster” during his youth. For Pinter and his peers, there consequently did not appear to be an alternative, politically or philosophically, to capitalist society, although the failings of this society had been pointed out by their predecessors (Smith, 2005:21).
In turn, Pinter’s influence on English drama cannot be overemphasised. David Mamet, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp are all indebted in a general sense to Pinter, while Jez Butterworth, Patrick Marber, Joe Penhall and David Eldridge were all influenced by Pinter’s comedy of characters lost in language and improvised confusions. Pinter’s modernism, in the tradition of Beckett and Kafka, inspired the plays of Mark Ravenhill and Martin Crimp, whereas the political plays of Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill carry traces of Pinter’s menacing political plays (Waters, 2009:300-302).
Unfortunately, Pinter is also, according to Dromgoole (2000:225), “the aircraft carrier from which many planes take off on shorter, less majestic trips.” Spencer (2000), for example, describes Martin Crimp’s The Country (2000) as an unsuccessful pastiche of Pinter: “That debt is particularly burdensome in The Country, and at times the piece seems less like an original play than an immensely skilful parody of dear old Harold.”13

Pinter and postmodern drama

Just as Pinter’s place in the canon does not neatly fit any category, critics also vastly differ on the level of postmodern innovation in his work. Pinter’s work is definitely traditional in the sense that it is firmly text based. In an interview with Bensky (2005:66), Pinter describes himself as a “traditional playwright,” who makes use of curtains and curtain lines. There is also no improvisation in his plays: “I don’t at all believe in the anarchic theatre of so-called ‘creative’ actors – the actors can do that in someone else’s plays” (Pinter in Bensky, 2005:55).
In an interview with Thompson (2005:46-47), Pinter furthermore explains that he always thinks of the proscenium arch when he writes, although he finds that different theatre forms, like theatre in the round, all have an equal number of liberating qualities and limitations. Smith (2005:31) argues that, although contemporary, Pinter’s plays are rooted in character, emotion and plot and therefore not avant-garde. Almansi and Henderson (1983:15) describe Pinter’s plays as follows:
His plays are conceived for an orthodox proscenium stage; they are conventionally based on speech and dialogue with only a marginal inference of physical action; they are written fully and intensely, their author seeming to abhor improvisation, ‘happenings,’ or any kind of aleatory technique (in this sense Pinter is definitely not a post-modernist playwright).
Scolnicov (2012:5-6), however, differs from Almansi and Henderson (1983) and describes Pinter’s categorization as traditional, adding to “the deceptive appearance of the plays’ surface realism,” while she unequivocally regards him as an avant-garde playwright. Scolnicov (2012:7), instead, agrees with Esslin (1992:41) who describes Pinter’s work as hypernaturalistic, although Scolnicov (2012:7) prefers the term “hyperrealism:”
At first look, Pinter’s plays appear to be realistic: the characters belong to well-defined, contemporary English social groups and classes, who talk in the proper registers and idiolects, and the prescribed scenery is of familiar English rooms. This semblance of realism may lead the actor, director, spectator, and reader to search for motivation and causation. But the search is futile and bound to end in frustration, since the text fails to supply reasons for the actions or behaviour. Accustomed to analysing well-made plays, the reader feels let down and may conclude that the plays are not well made and are written in a puzzling style.
The avant-garde elements of Pinter’s plays are thus subtle, yet very evident upon closer inspection. As mentioned in Chapter Two, realism is elastic enough to encompass dissidence. Despite Pinter’s resistance towards improvisation and his preference for the proscenium, the postmodern and poststructuralist concerns about language and art investigated in this study are present in Pinter’s major themes and techniques. Pinter therefore represents an example of the type of play Meisner and Mounsef (2011:89) describe when they argue that a text based form need not necessarily imply conservative or traditional theatre: “radical performance does not always translate into radical politics.”
Even Almansi and Henderson (1983:78), who do not regard Pinter as a postmodernist, concede that he began to investigate the idea that a “fixed, objective reality” does not exist. Pinter (in Esslin, 1992:32) himself has also stated that “there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.” This idea, consequently, forms the basis of Pinter’s notorious silence with regard to the history of his characters.14 For Scolnicov (2012:1), it is probably impossible to find a rational explanation for every word and action in Pinter’s plays. The audience never finds out who exactly the characters are, and his plays therefore seem opaque since they depart from established ideas of realism in the theatre. Esslin (1992:31) argues that this is exactly the way in which Pinter’s plays resemble reality: “we do not know, with any semblance of certainty what motivates our own wives, parents, our own children – why then should we be furnished with a complete dossier about the motivations of any character we casually encounter on stage?” Therefore, Esslin (1992:41) also sees Pinter’s plays as highly ambivalent, even multivalent and not traditional, although the plays resemble reality; “for reality itself is equally multivalent.”
The non-verifiability of the past and the ways in which we reconstruct the past through memory therefore constitute an important theme in Pinter’s oeuvre. In this regard he (2005:21-22) remarks:
I’ve never started a play with any kind of abstract idea or theory. Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened?
The inaccessibility of the world for Pinter’s characters influences how they communicate. Esslin (1992:227) argues that his biggest contribution to modern drama is exposing how stage dialogue overestimated the way in which human beings actually use language. Pinter has often been grouped with the Absurd dramatists on the premise that his plays illustrate the failure of communication. However, he (2008) does not agree with this interpretation of his work:
We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase ‘failure of communication’… and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard [sic] attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
Hence Pinter does not investigate the fact that our attempts at communication are unsuccessful, but rather the fact that we communicate in unexpected ways. For Almansi and Henderson (1983:15), humans are alone in Pinter’s world and communication is difficult and dangerous. Social connections – supposed to break the isolation of the human condition – are untrustworthy and treacherous.
Pinter’s plays are furthermore known for an atmosphere of menace, their commitment to political causes, and his idiosyncratic rhythm and pauses, usually described by the adjective “Pinteresque” (Law, 2011:390). This rhythm obviously also impacts on the way that Pinter is performed. According to Scolnicov (2012:8), it is very difficult for a Method Actor to act in a Pinter play, since “Pinter demands a different approach: a hyperrealistic fidelity to external appearances together with an opaqueness that deliberately refuses to suggest motives or inner workings of the mind.” For Scolnicov (2012), an actor should thus not try to find a motivation for every word or action he or she speaks or performs. The actor should merely achieve a guise required by the text.
Peter Hall (2005:137), collaborator and first director of many of Pinter’s plays, disagrees, affirming that “people who think that all you’ve got to do in Pinter is to say it, hold the pause, and then say the next line, are wrong.” Hall (2005:137-138) describes his rehearsal method which involves a process of “veiling.” According to Hall, Pinter’s characters veil their emotions and motivations with discrepant words and actions. In rehearsal, his actors are then required to determine the emotion or motivation which they are veiling:
actors can’t play veiling until they know what they’re veiling, so we play mockery, we play hatred, we play animosity, we play the extreme black-and-white terms of a character. That stage of rehearsal is very crude, but it’s a very important stage, because unless the actor understands what game he is playing, what his actual underlying motivations are, the ambiguity of the text will mean nothing. (Hall, 2005:137)
Although actors are sometimes concerned that an audience might overlook their veiled motivations, Hall (2005:137) is confident that an audience will grasp the full nuance of such a performance.
The other aspect of Pinter, regarding production, which Hall (2005:138) emphasises is that the script should not be altered in performance. Actors and directors often change the words in their scripts until they are comfortable delivering these. According to Hall (2005:138) each pause and silence in Pinter’s writing is there for a specific reason and the director and actors’ “job is to find out why.”

Betrayal within Pinter’s oeuvre

By the time Pinter wrote Betrayal in the late 1970s, he was already established as a major figure in British theatre, and the above mentioned qualities of his work and its production had already been accepted by audiences. The plays that he wrote in the 1970s also marked a definite shift in milieu, from working class East London to the more affluent centre, or west. Class and social tension do, however, remain as themes throughout, while the emphasis on time and memory is increased (Smith, 2005:32). The plays of the 1970s examine English cultural life and identity viewed through a sense of loss and the uncertainty of the past (Smith, 2005:34).
It is against this backdrop that Smith (2005:35) describes Betrayal as a “study in English disillusionment and equivocation.” The seemingly simple tale of adultery therefore proves on closer inspection to ask the question “how can we trust what we know?” If the events in the play were to be chronologically considered, Betrayal would begin in 1968 with a flirtation at a party between Jerry, the best friend of the host, Robert, and Emma, the hostess. This flirtation develops into an affair which takes place in a rented flat in Kilburn. The audience sees a scene set in this flat, at the height of the affair in 1971, in which Emma reveals to Jerry that she is pregnant by her husband, Robert. Emma and Robert subsequently visit Venice in 1973 where Robert finds out about the affair and confronts Emma. Back in London, Emma and Jerry have another rendezvous in their flat but Emma does not tell Jerry that Robert knows about the affair. Robert and Jerry lunch together at an Italian restaurant shortly after this, where Robert also does not tell Jerry that he knows about the affair, although he seems visibly tense about it. A year later, Jerry drops in at Robert and Emma’s house for a drink where all three parties keep up the pretence of a happily married couple and their platonic friend who is visiting. In 1975, the affair is dissolved. This happens in Emma and Jerry’s rented flat; the reasons given for the dissolution are the demands of the characters’ respective jobs. Two years later, in 1977, Jerry and Emma meet at a bar for a drink. Emma reveals that her marriage to Robert is over, and that she had told him about the affair between her and Jerry the previous night. The last event of the play is a confrontation between Robert and Jerry where Jerry finds out that Robert had known about the affair since 1973.
This rather banal plotline is, however, related to the audience in a mostly reversed chronological order. The play starts with Emma and Jerry’s drink at the pub, moves forward to Jerry and Robert’s confrontation after which it shifts backward to the dissolution of the affair, the social gathering at Robert and Emma’s house where all three characters pretend that the affair does not exist, then further back to the scene in Venice where Robert finds out about the affair. From here the play shifts forward again to Jerry and Emma’s reunion in their flat and Robert and Jerry’s lunch at the Italian restaurant, after which it proceeds backward again to the height of the affair – and ends with a scene in Robert and Emma’s bedroom where Jerry makes his first advances on Emma.
For Scolnicov (2012:105), the reverse chronology of the play is its most innovative aspect, turning the banality of the subject matter into a novelty. Since the outcome of the events is already known, suspense is replaced with an unpacking of what caused these events: “every new scene turns out to be unexpected because, although we know the outcome, we don’t know the steps that lead up to it.” In this regard, Burkman (1982:506) refers to Betrayal as an “autopsy,” because of its reversed structure.
Nevertheless, as mentioned in Chapter One, Betrayal met with a very hostile reception when it opened in 1978 and was criticised in the main for being banal, insubstantial and uninteresting. According to Elsom (1981:249), Pinter did not “at any point try to conceal the basis of the story, which, as several papers pointed out gleefully, could have had an autobiographical connection. There was nothing perplexing about what happened, no veils of cunning ambiguity.” It is on the grounds of this superficial interpretation of the play that Kretzmer (in Elsom, 1981:251) called it a “woman’s magazine romance,” while for Hirschhorn (in Elsom, 1981:251) it was “a very insubstantial so-what piece of work.” Young (in Elsom, 1981:252) felt that “Mr. Pinter has made his characters such uninteresting people” and also asks “well, so what?” of the play. Ironically, Bock (1981:182) states that “the dialogue tells us facts and is without depth,” while Wardle (in Elsom, 1981:253) asserts that Pinter’s “obsession with the irretrievable past and the fallibility of subjective memory finds no expression in this play.” He adds that “the dialogue throughout is of studied banality, broken occasionally by a short-lived explosion of lust or anger,” but concedes that “it would be false to say that there is nothing ambiguous in the play” (Wardle in Elsom, 1981:254).
Despite this wave of negative criticism of Betrayal, Nightingale (in Elsom, 1981:254-255), praised the play, in particular its “anti-clockwise” chronology: “it substitutes the question ‘how?’ for the cruder ‘what next?’ in the minds of the audience. And in my view it deepens and darkens our perception of the play, infecting the most innocent encounters with irony, dread and a sense of doom.” Of the critics cited above, only Nightingale, and Wardle to an extent, thus grasped the nuances in Pinter’s text and picked up on the deeper levels hidden beneath the smooth surface of banality.
In his seminal The life and work of Harold Pinter (1996:258-259), Billington speculates that he and other critics were initially hostile towards Betrayal for three reasons.
Firstly, against critics’ expectations, the play was not committed or political. Secondly, the original production did not realise the play’s full potential: according to Billington (1996:325), the Lyttleton Theatre, where it was first performed, was too big and the National Theatre was experiencing industrial problems at the time. A subsequent revival of the play in 1990, which was performed in a more intimate venue, had a much better reception. Lastly, the audience interpreted the play as a type of Mills and Boon novel, instead of seeing the self-betrayal as a steadily infecting virus.
The critics’ and audience’s expectations thus seem to be a major factor in the initial reception of the play. In Betrayal, Pinter did address themes and techniques that were by this time associated with him. Language and communication and the various ways in which people use it to mask and obscure, as well as the impossibility of verifying the past, were also investigated. The play moreover features long pauses, questions in response to questions and limited dialogue (Ben-Zvi, 1980:227). But, according to Ben-Zvi (1980:227), Betrayal does deviate from Pinter’s previous work in that there are no innuendoes, sinister ambiguities or impending disasters. Nonetheless, while I shall argue that there are indeed innuendoes in Betrayal, Ben-Zvi (1980) is correct in pointing out the absence of the impending sense of doom so familiar in Pinter’s previous work. Scolnicov (2012:106) aptly sums up the initial reaction to Betrayal, when she states that In his previous plays, the audience was left baffled by the inscrutability of the characters. In Betrayal, Pinter seems to be mocking us, by providing all the identity data one might wish for; but, for all that, the mystery of the human personality remains unchanged.
The themes usually associated with Pinter thus appear in Betrayal in a disguised, but no less effective manner. I continue to explore the themes of mediation, recycling and mimicry in Betrayal, for the remainder of this chapter. I additionally investigate the subsequent implications of metatheatre in the play.

 Mediation as theme and dramatic strategy in Betrayal

As mentioned above, mediation, for the purposes of this study, refers to any communicative act (be it through language or art) between two or more human beings. As I have noted, for Bakhtin (in Shotter & Billig, 1998:16) the only way for one person to know another is through dialectic discourse, which entails observable acts of communication. A play by a dramatist such as Pinter, who is known for his idiosyncratic use of language on stage, invites an investigation of the concept of community that mediation establishes between characters, the use of language in the play, the way the characters use narrative to construct their pasts and ideas of deception and originality.

Isolation versus community among the three characters in Betrayal

As explained above, Maturana and Varela (1980:5) as well as Bakhtin (in Hitchcock, 1998:92) perceive human beings as quintessentially isolated, since it is impossible to fully experience another’s pain. This is especially applicable to Pinter’s characters in Betrayal, since, as Cahn (1993:4) points out, “no matter how much they talk, no matter how much they attempt to establish a bond through language, these characters remain trapped in loneliness.” Griffith (1992:99) links this phenomenon with the theory of Bakhtin in which no character’s definition of reality is able to be identical to that of his or her interlocutor, although the latter may have much in common with him or her.
When Robert and Jerry discuss the affair after Emma has told Jerry in Scene One that she has confessed to Robert, the impossibility of completely knowing another becomes evident:
JERRY:
ROBERT:
JERRY:
ROBERT:
JERRY:
ROBERT:
JERRY:
ROBERT:
JERRY:
ROBERT:
JERRY:
But you betrayed her for years, didn’t you?
Oh yes.
And she never knew about it. Did she?
Didn’t she?
Pause
I didn’t.
No, you didn’t know very much about anything, really, did you?
Pause
No.
Yes you did.
Yes I did. I lived with her.
Yes. In the afternoons.
Sometimes very long ones. For seven years.
This passage simultaneously illustrates and thwarts the idea of community between two individuals. Jerry and Emma’s clandestine affair created an insulated community which excludes Robert and anybody else. Yet the preceding dialogue indicates that Jerry was also excluded from Robert and Emma’s community in which they shared knowledge about the other’s affairs.
For Almansi and Henderson (1983:12), the lack of community between characters in Pinter’s plays is so pronounced that words and language do not function as conduits between two individuals, but rather as “barbs to protect the wired enclosure of the self.” Therefore communication among the characters in Betrayal occurs in indirect ways, through a discussion on squash, the success of the authors that they represent, and their children’s lives (Roof, 1993:80). But these means of mediation still isolate the characters and resist community.
According to Esslin (1992:189), the isolation of the characters in Betrayal extends also to their memory and pasts: “the passage of time changes our perception of what the past was like and what we were like – who we were – in the past.” A character is thus not only cut off from other characters, but also from past versions of him- or herself. The perception of certain past events undergoes a transformation, according to Esslin (1992:189).
Betrayal accordingly sketches a situation where a sense of community is created between characters, but this community is subsequently betrayed, resulting in a resistance to community by these characters. Therefore, the title of the play refers to the idea of betrayal, rather than one specific betrayal, or it might possibly have been called “The Betrayal” (Scolnicov, 2012:107). Ben-Zvi (1980:228) seems to agree, when she points out that “the parameters of the topic are broad enough to subsume almost every facet of contemporary experience. The subject is not betrayal, but existence in society.”
According to Billington (1996:259), there are four main betrayals in the text, which include “betrayal of self, betrayal of others, betrayal of art” (Leveaux in Billington, 1996:326): marital betrayal, the betrayal of lovers’ trust, the male friendship bond and literary idealism. Marital betrayal is the most obvious of the betrayals in the play, since all three on-stage characters and most of the off-stage characters possibly commit adultery, or suggest that they are doing so. Emma not only betrays Robert with Jerry, but later on also with Casey, an author whom Jerry represents and Robert publishes. According to Robert, he has repeatedly cheated on Emma, although there is no confirmation for this, other than Robert’s own words.15 Jerry betrays his wife, Judith, with Emma, and the possibility that Judith is having an affair with a colleague is mentioned. Even so, marriage is not the only community the characters create and then betray.
As Robert’s remark about Jerry’s afternoons with Emma in the excerpt quoted above indicates, the characters also form a community in their extramarital affairs. Ben-Zvi (1980:229) believes Emma betrays Jerry when she conceives a child with her husband. In an affair such as theirs, however, where none of the parties consider dissolving their marriages to marry each other, it is debatable whether or not this constitutes a break in lovers’ trust. Nonetheless Emma does betray Jerry when she fails to inform him that Robert has found out about the affair. Esslin (1992:193) describes this situation as follows:
This amounts to Robert and Emma jointly betraying Jerry by leaving him in a fool’s paradise, thinking that he is betraying Robert and basking in the – as it now turns out – spurious feeling of superiority that comes from knowing something important that another person does not.
The secret that Robert and Emma thus keep from Jerry also betrays the bond of male friendship between the two men. This betrayal is serious enough for Ben-Zvi (1980:231) to assert that the reason that Jerry is upset about Robert’s knowledge of the affair is that it taints their friendship. I am, however, inclined to concur with Esslin (1992:193) that it is, rather, the fact that he was left in a “fool’s paradise,” excluded from the community between Robert and Emma, who shared this secret.
Yet Esslin (1992:193) also believes that it is the breaking of the male bond that most upsets Robert when he finds out about the affair, but, based on Peter Hall’s idea of veiling in Pinter’s plays discussed above and the way that the characters continually establish communities with each other only to betray these communities, I shall argue – throughout this chapter – that Robert’s repeated reference to his and Jerry’s friendship when he learns of the affair is designed to re-establish his community with Jerry, in order to exclude Emma and hide the fact that he was also living in a “fool’s paradise.”
It is, however, justifiable that Esslin (1992:190) regards the community between the two males as Emma’s motivation to yield to Jerry’s advances. Emma seems to resist Jerry’s attempts at seduction up to the point where Robert enters and appears indifferent to Jerry’s behaviour towards Emma, which is clearly inappropriate: “Emma has yielded to Jerry because she resents Robert’s physical intimacy with Jerry, because she is jealous of Jerry’s relationship with her husband.” All three characters thus seem to be in a constant battle with the others to form a community, and not be left isolated.
These various affairs, for Esslin (1992:197), appear to take up almost all of the characters’ time since they are largely preoccupied by them, although he does continue:
at the same time, these sexual relationships are shown, by Pinter, to be superficial in the extreme; far from being passionate involvements, elemental and irresistible, they seem casual and trivial, hardly more involving than the occasional drunken binge, a form of amusement that will pass the time and alleviate the boredom of an affluent and meaningless existence.
Esslin (1992:197) concludes that this behaviour betrays the characters’ lack of literary loyalty and demonstrates how literary middlemen and gallery managers are not committed to what they do. However, I perceive this as a rather harsh interpretation of the characters and their motivations which negates a few aspects of Pinter’s play referred to above. Firstly, Pinter shows us only some scenes in the characters’ lives, all of which concern their affairs. Emma did, after all, mention her hours at the gallery as one of the reasons she and Jerry could not meet more often. Secondly, to interpret the characters’ relationships as “casual and trivial” denies Peter Hall’s technique of veiling. Robert’s tirade at the publishing industry in Scene Seven is indeed a thinly veiled mask for his frustration over Jerry and Emma’s affair. Even Jerry seems sceptical about it, and interjects first with “What are you talking about?” (115) and later with “You must be pissed” (116).
The marital betrayal in the text is, as a result, shown to influence, as well as mirror, other aspects of the characters’ lives. Although the characters are all successful in their jobs, Robert and Jerry both betrayed their own literary idealism. They were both once poetry editors at Oxford and Cambridge but have now become an agent and a publisher, literary middlemen to best-selling authors. According to Ben-Zvi (1980:232), the career of Casey, the author whom Jerry represents and Robert publishes, clearly connotes an increase in commercialism and decrease in artistic merit: from poet to promising but commercially unsuccessful novelist, to producing marketable writing and lastly considering a film contract with Hollywood. As Billington (1996:159) describes this: “behind the play’s action lies an aching awareness of the way the high ideals of youth are betrayed by the compromises of daily life.” The characters are in other words betraying their younger selves, or breaking up the community with earlier versions of themselves, as suggested above. This situation is also universal to an extent, as Billington (1996:259) avers elsewhere: “they are not only parasitic middlemen, but, by extension, symbols of all those who betray their youthful commitments for the sake of bland, middle-aged affluence.”
Pinter therefore, through the marital infidelity, progressively comments on various forms of betrayal, “until his original triangle has disappeared, leaving a void in the center of ever widening circles of human interaction. Hence he produces a dramatic equivalent to the Yeatsian absence of center and the subsequent loss of fixity in a constantly changing world” (Ben-Zvi, 1980:228).16 As the play raises existential issues about human interaction, the temporary establishment of community and the role that language plays in the mediation between individuals, it consequently also underscores Nietzsche’s notion of the loss of an essential truth.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
DECLARATION
ABSTRACT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Contextualisation
1.2. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the concept of authenticity in popular culture
1.3. Pinter’s Betrayal, Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Marber’s Closer
1.4. Literature survey
1.5. Research problem and objectives
1.6. Thesis statement
1.7. Methodology
1.8. Conclusion
CHAPTER 2: THEORIES ABOUT TRUTH AND ARTIFICE IN LITERATURE AND THEATRE
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The impossibility of authenticity
2.3. Language: barrier or conduit to the real self?
2.4. Literature: mimesis and metatext
2.5. Theatre: the authenticity of corporeality
2.6. Conclusion
CHAPTER 3: HAROLD PINTER’S KALEIDOSCOPE OF BETRAYALS
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Pinter’s influences and influence
3.3. Pinter and postmodern drama
3.4. Betrayal within Pinter’s oeuvre
3.5. Mediation as theme and dramatic strategy in Betrayal
3.6. Recycling and mimicry
3.7. Metatheatrical implications of Betrayal
3.8. Conclusion
CHAPTER 4: TOM STOPPARD’S PERPLEXING HALL OF MIRRORS IN THE REAL THING
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Stoppard’s place in the dramatic canon
4.3. The Real Thing within Stoppard’s oeuvre
4.4. The characters’ debates about authenticity in art and life
4.5. Mimicry
4.6. Metatheatrical implications of the various mise en abymes in The Real Thing
4.7. Conclusion
CHAPTER 5: THE CHARACTER AS MIRAGE IN PATRICK MARBER’S CLOSER
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Cool Britannia and the inspiration for Closer
5.3. The body versus the mind
5.4. Mediation failing as authentic representation of the actual world
5.5. The recycling and mimicry of various images in Closer
5.6. Metatheatrical implications of form and metareference
5.7. Conclusion
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION
LIST OF REFERENCES:
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