The synopsis lays it all out before you: Emma (Alison Bell) and Jerry (Nathan O'Keefe) meet for the first time since ending their long-term affair; Emma reveals she's just told her husband Robert (Mark Saturno). who happens to be Jerry's best friend. Jerry quickly meets up with Robert to clear the air, only to find out Robert's known about it for years and never said anything. The rest of the play shows us flashbacks of interactions between the three characters throughout the affair. Little more insight into the characters' motivations is gleaned, and nothing elicits any emotional resonance when everything should, though this is not the fault of Harold Pinter's script.
The long silences, at first allowing us to draw our own conclusions of what the characters must be feeling, quickly outstay their welcome, despite being much shorter than Pinter originally wrote them. One can soon pinpoint exactly when a scene will change; the predictability of the tension in the play negates it. The scene transitions are at least interesting to observe — the circular clothes rack revolves clockwise, shielding the set changes that are soundtracked by electronic, glitchy music overlayed with piano. However, it feels at odds with the '70s setting of the play.
The coldness and lack of cohesion in this version of Betrayal leaves us feeling, in a word, indifferent.
