Betrayal - Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter's Betrayal received its premiere at the National Theatre, London, in November 1978. After an initially guarded response from the critics, the work was rapidly reevaluated and won the Olivier Award for Best New Play the following year. Set in London and Venice the play has an innovative chronology that opens at the end of an affair and works its way backwards over nine years, from 1977 to 1968. It is widely considered one of the playwright's pivotal works.

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. He lived with Antonia Fraser from 1975 and they married in 1980. In 1995 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize, awarded for a lifetime's achievement in literature. In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre. In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the same year, the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry and the Franz Kafka Award (Prague). In 2006 he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize and, in 2007, the highest French honour, the Lgion d'honneur. He died in December 2008.

Pinter has found a way of making memory active and dramatic . . . a master craftsman honouring his talent by setting it new, difficult tasks.
New Statesman

There is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . The play's subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.
The Times