The Marysburgh Mummers

“The greatest, and the most moving, of all Pinter’s plays.” The Telegraph

“The haunted, fractured half-lives of adulterers, torn between two beds, two narrative tracks, two sets of memories.”The Guardian

“Pinter’s writing has the incisiveness of a knife blade...any ill-chosen word might detonate a bomb.” The Hollywood Reporter

A seven-year affair. A love triangle. Lies, deception. Betrayal is critically regarded as one of Pinter's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions, veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-)deceptions. The play uses reverse chronology, instead of telling the story of the adulterous affair from its beginning to its end, it starts with the dying embers of the relationship and works slowly backward to its beginning nine years earlier. The anti-clockwise time sequence allows Pinter to explore numerous ironies and moments of bad faith among all three characters, and examine several different kinds of betrayal — between wife and husband to be sure, but also between mistress and lover and between the two male friends who each cheat on the other in different ways.