The Stage

Betrayal, Almeida Theatre, London, 1991

My sister was living in London and was always getting us tickets. One minute we were seeing Prince, the next it was the Japanese Noh production of Macbeth at the National. But what really bowled me over was Betrayal. I didn’t know the play and [of the cast members] I didn’t really know of Bill Nighy and only knew Cheryl Campbell from TV plays. The one I did know was Martin Shaw, from quite crap TV, but he was wonderful – even though I thought he was almost too sexy to play Robert, the husband.

It wasn’t just the subject of an affair but the way it was written, especially the reverse chronology, and also the strong connection between the three actors. I completely believed it and that it was entirely possible there was no loyalty between them. I wanted to identify with the woman, but she was playing a double game. I wasn’t a mother at the time but it struck me how dangerous that was for her.

It was compelling, even though I found Robert revolting. He’s one of those people where it’s one rule for him, another for his wife. But what stood out was Shaw’s venom. He was very spare, wonderfully reined in by the text. He didn’t say much, but expressed a lot.

I thought all marriages were toxic, and here was another one

They had these avuncular conversations, but with barbs. And there was an acidity to Shaw’s Robert, who always had the upper hand with Nighy’s Jerry, who was like a puppy around him, loping about with this long, impetuous body in contrast to the others.

As Emma, Campbell had real strength and backbone as well as being beautiful. She had wit and stillness and a sensuality that Jerry needed. He describes her as a “real jewel” and she was. Being a singer, I always notice when voices don’t match the text, but she varied the pitch of her voice an awful lot – using a hard, flat tone [when speaking] to her husband and a much softer tone to Jerry. And there was laughter in it, too.

I was 27. My parents had divorced when I was 15 after a very toxic marriage. I thought all marriages were toxic and here was another one. All this slinging of passive-aggressive insults was very much what happened with them. Because I absolutely knew that language, it made me uncomfortable. I call that being touched, moved, affected… that’s what a play should do, what all art should do – make you think: ‘Christ, that relates to me: whether I like it or not, I am part of that story.’

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Analysis – David Benedict

Penelope Wilton remembers that on the first day of rehearsals for the original 1978 National Theatre production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Peter Hall, the director, told her, her real-life husband Daniel Massey (as Robert) and Michael Gambon (as her lover Jerry) that he had cast all three of them because they were comedians. The implication was that it needed three actors with first-rate timing and control of subtext to play three characters who spend the play lying to each other.

The genius of Pinter’s poignant, powerful masterpiece lies in its meticulous structure. For the most part, it runs backwards from a seemingly casual but emotionally supercharged re-meet between Emma and her ex-lover in 1977, all the way back to their first illicit moment of connection in 1968.

What makes the play so gripping is that in every scene the audience is in a different relationship to the characters. We’re not simply passive viewers. Two scenes in the middle change everything by moving forward in time, massively upping the thriller-like suspense. When Emma lies to her husband, we know he knows, and become desperate for her not to tell the truth.

The play famously drew on Pinter’s affair with broadcaster Joan Bakewell while married to actor Vivien Merchant. Bakewell wrote her own play, Keeping in Touch, telling the story from her point of view. It was aired by BBC Radio 4 in 2017.

Sarah Connolly is a mezzo-soprano. She performs songs by Zemlinsky at Snape Maltings on 26th June as part of the Aldeburgh Festival