Harold Pinter looks at infidelity

Press, 19 December 1985, Page 12

Harold Pinter looks at infidelity

It was in New York early in 1980 that the film producer, Sam Spiegel, and playwright, Harold Pinter, first talked of the possibility of filming “Betrayal,” which will start at the Academy tomorrow. The film version of the study of infidelity stars Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge. The play was running successfully in New York in 1980, and was subsequently to be performed in many countries and in several languages. Spiegel saw it as a film on an intimate canvas with world-wide “boulevardier” appeal — a far cry from the epic-scale movies which. have been among his greatest successes and testimony to his claim that he never repeats himself. He believes that nothing in the genre has been attempted since David Lean directed Noel Coward’s “Brief Encounter” nearly 40 years ago.

“Like that film,” he says, “‘Betrayal’ has few characters and they are locked into an emotional situation which has taken control of their lives. It is a story of the impermanence of love.” Pinter adds that the piece is about the “various different kinds of betrayal” — a story in which all three characters betray one another in separate ways.

“It moves backwards in time over a period of nine years,” Pinter says, “and it has to do with two friends who have known each other since their college days, and the wife of one of them who has an affair with the friend of her husband.

“We see the story move from the point when it is all over, right back to the point

when it all began, to when the lover first declared his love for the lady.”

This movement backwards gives the piece a structure that is almost musical, with the three characters changing partners as in a dance to rhythms dictated by the passing of time. Add to this the special effect of Pinter’s unique conversational style dialogue whose cadences suggest a middle ground between what people say and what they are thinking, and you have a movie of disturbing intensity. Spiegel has known Pinter for over 20 years. Ever since “The Caretaker” in 1960 revealed the dramatist as a major new talent on the theatrical scene, the two men have been friends and a mark of the dramatist’s respect for the film producer has been that over the years he has sent drafts of his work to Spiegel before they were performed or published.

In 1976, Pinter wrote the screenplay for Spiegel’s movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon.”

During the preparation and production of “Betrayal,” they worked very closely together and Pinter was a frequent visitor to the filming. Shooting of “Betrayal” began in March, 1982, on location in London, and London provided all but one of the settings for the story of the triangular relationship between a publisher, his wife and a literary agent. The publisher’s home was represented by a fine midVictorian house in St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, a section of West London, fav-

oured by literary and theatre people. For the literary agent’s home, a house in Kentish Town was chosen, a section to the north on high ground, giving panoramic views of the city. For the apartment the lovers rent during the period of their affair, the top floor of a house .in Kilburn in the north-west of ■ London was selected.

Other locations included a London pub in a rather seedy section of Shepherd’s " Bush in West London, a * Soho-style restawant, and a “ car wrecking yard. The company then went ' into the Twickenham Film J Studios for a week to shoot the interior of a Venice 2 Hotel. Establishing shots “ were filmed in Venice itself. Principal photography was * completed in May, 1982. J