• Betrayal Harold Pinter Full Text

• Abstract Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930, became a professional actor, and wrote his first play in 1957. 1 He married an actress, Vivien Merchant, in 1956; they were divorced in 1980 and she died in 1982. She had performed in many of his works; although he did not write parts specifically for her, ‘she has. Proved to be very good in my plays’ (he said in 1971), because she had what he called ‘a wonderful instinct for [the] roles’.

Betrayal Harold Pinter Full Text

2 Since their partnership ended he has not written a good play, indeed no play of any length or substance: his great period extends from 1960, when The Caretaker was produced, to 1978, the year when Betrayal was put on. Betrayal, a play about marital infidelity, contained the first major female role not created for Vivien Merchant, and this happened to coincide with public knowledge that Pinter had left his wife for another person.

Future biographers will no doubt either confirm or invalidate the assumption made by audiences at the time that the two events were connected; my present purpose is not to speculate about this, but rather to note that Pinter’s greatness as a dramatist rests on the production of the last eighteen years or so he spent under the influence of the wife-muse Vivien Merchant.