Trahisons

She is married to Robert, a publisher, an old friend of Jerry’s and above all his squash partner. This is the starting point set by Pinter before he retraces, in reverse chronology, the twists and turns of this love affair involving three friends: separations move to meetings, confessions to lies, and secrets to betrayals. This story told in reverse weaves and unravels the enigmatic bonds of love and friendship that connect the trio, in which each has constructed his or her own truth, and despite the audience being warned of the outcome, the play succeeds in drawing it into the drama.

Harold Pinter, the author
The English actor, screenwriter and playwright Harold Pinter (1930-2008), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, was a major figure of the British theatre revival in the 1950s. The atmosphere of malaise and cruelty that characterised his early works, a style qualified as “comedy of menace”, evolved into an exploration of intimacy and into political concerns from the 1980s. Apart from the relationships between couples, a subject at the heart of the plays from the middle period –The Collection (1961), The Lover (1962) Old Times (1970) and Betrayal (premiered in 1978 and made as a film in 1982)– memory is one of his recurring themes. Betrayal borrows the equation of bourgeois theatre –the husband, the wife, the lover– but deconstructs it thanks to its narrative artifice to reveal the essence, the depth and intricacies of this bond between them.

Frédéric Bélier-Garcia, the director
Director of the Nouveau Théâtre d’Angers since 2007, Frédéric Bélier-Garcia taught philosophy before devoting himself to directing theatre and opera as well as screenwriting. After Max Frisch’sBiography: A Game (1999), he staged Petter S. Rosenlund’s An Impossible Boy in 2000 at the Comédie-Française. He won the Syndicat de la critique prize for his staging of Marie Ndiaye’s Hilda in 2002. In 2007, he co-directedLe Mental de l’équipe (The Team’s Mental Strength) with Denis Podalydès, a play he also co-wrote with Emmanuel Bourdieu. In Betrayals, he admires “[…] Pinter’s miniaturist precision. The ordinary theme of adultery is gradually scraped away to reveal what might be called the paradox of betrayal, the thing that both condemns an affair and triggers the heroic, hidden effort to save it, a misguided loyalty to the first promise of love.