Sydney Reviews

It’s sex, lies and vertical blinds in Sport for Jove’s production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Old Fitz.

Like Pinter’s earlier masterpiece, The Caretaker, Betrayal has three characters, this time two males and a female, a love triangle, which, mixing mathematical metaphor, casts quite a circumference of deceit.

For Emma, the triangle is equilateral, her care and affection for her husband, Robert, their home and family equal to her care and affection to her lover, Jerry, Robert’s oldest friend and best man at their wedding.

Emma conducts their affair in a polygamous manner, making a home of the flat they have rented for their assignations. Jerry shares the equilateral equation, possibly because his duplicity is similar to Emma – he too has a spouse and children and a home. Robert sees the triangle as more obtuse, a betrayal.

Pinter devotes his technical efforts and focus on what is happening now and what happened then rather than what happens next, with his considerable verbal gifts and organisation of nuances and subsequent mastery of atmosphere presenting disclosures with devastating dramatic effect.

The trio of actors plunge into the Pinter pool with strong emotional impetus. Ella Scott Lynch is mesmerising as Emma, a simmering complexity of a woman who harbours two havens of coupledom while keeping consequences and casualties at bay.

Matt Hardie presents Jerry as somewhat a puppet, a marionette manipulated by his feelings for both Emma and Robert, each of whom adept at pulling his strings. 

Andrew Cutcliffe is exceptional as Robert, the apex male subjectively reduced to the periphery.

Diego Retamales delights with a comic cameo as an Italian waiter.

Director Cristabel Sved choreographs the chronological shifts with an economy of stage craft and Melanie Liertz' set consisting of a vertical blind backdrop and a set of chairs is the epitome of elegant design sufficiency.