Dreaming Back: BETRAYAL’s Reverse Chronology
The play’s backwards timeline provides insights — and suspense
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company January 10 through February 17, 2019, Betrayal is ingeniously constructed: Harold Pinter’s story of a love affair and the ripple effects it has on all three participants moves both forwards and backwards. The play begins with the affair’s aftermath and concludes with the affair’s beginning, with two strategically placed scenes of forward movement.
“He said the story started to tell itself backwards,” said actress and director Maria Aitken of Pinter and Betrayal. “It was based on an incident in his own life, a love affair. So his own memory came into play. You live life forwards, but you remember it backwards.”
Betrayal’s mix of forward and backward momentum creates this two-sided temporal landscape for the audience. When the play moves forward, we are watching the immediate aftermath of a major shift, and living those moments along with the characters. But when the play moves backwards, we are placed in the position of the rememberer, imbuing what we see with the knowledge of what’s to come. We live and remember simultaneously, while the characters do not have this same hindsight.
Betrayal was written during Pinter’s middle period, in which he often investigated memory and the ways we construct memories to better suit our current position. There may even be a sly reference to this in the play’s first scene, when Emma tells Jerry their meeting is “just like old times.” Old Times is the title of a 1970 Pinter play that is bound up in shifting recollections among a trio: a married couple and the wife’s female friend, a reversal of Betrayal’s central characters. Old Times was followed by No Man’s Land, which also deals with the unreliability of memory and our ability to construct narratives out of the past to benefit our present.
But the reverse chronology of Betrayal is not just a parlor trick to explore the experience of memory. Its unique construction deepens the story and the characters, always allowing us to know more than they do and to know them better than they know themselves.
Because we know how the affair ends, we watch individual moments with the full weight of its eventual implosion. When a character says “I don’t think we don’t love each other,” the backwards trajectory allows us more insight into last. the hedging double negative since we already know the couple’s fate. Without wondering how a choice will affect the facts of the future, we instead can evaluate why these actions had those ripples, how adaptable and loaded language can be, and what it says about these people that they would do and say these things.
The deepening of the language, and the truths it reveals about the characters, is one of the major innovations of the play’s structure. According to William McEvoy, writing for the British Library, “Pinter’s great achievement in Betrayal is to make a detective story out of a play whose ending we know from the start. Instead of being absorbed by the events of the narrative, we become calculating analysers of language, complicit with the characters’ lies, shocked by our perception of the way banal words can mask such powerful emotions and contain such painful ironies.” The tension arises not from the question “What’s going to happen?”, but from “Why will it happen, and how, and will the characters ever know everything I do?”
Betrayal is one of the most important plays to use an unconventional time structure to reveal deeper meaning, but it’s not alone. Three years after Betrayal’s debut, Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along (which is loosely based on a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play of the same title) moves backwards, starting with its protagonists as jaded, fractured adults and moving backwards into youthful idealism and camaraderie. Musical repetition is a helpful tool in this reverse chronology; a song like “Not a Day Goes By” can be reprised with two different sets of lyrics. When it is first sung in Act 1 (in the last half of the story), it is mournful; when it is reprised in Act 2, the hope and possibility of the lyrics contrasts with the melody the audience already associates with pain and loss.
More recently, Marina Carr’s 2011 play Phaedra Backwards uses a fluid chronology to tell the Greek myth of Phaedra, Theseus, and the Minotaur essentially from the end to the beginning, with both forward and backward movement interrupted by memory. Like Betrayal, it trades on our knowing the end from the start, both because it shows it to us and because of our foreknowledge of the myth; taking the forward momentum out of the play allows an audience to instead reinvestigate motivation and choice in a story many think they know well.
While it does not employ strict reverse chronology, Copenhagen, produced at the Lantern in 2018 and 2004, uses some of the same tools. The characters as we meet them are dead; we know how their lives ended up, and that they are preoccupied with a friendship’s dissolution and the world events that precipitated it. To discover how and why the relationship went wrong, they must continuously revisit moments from their past, playing and replaying them, building and rebuilding the structure of the memory to see new elements of it. In its backwards looks and cyclical repetitions, Copenhagen engages in a kind of “dreaming back”: a term coined by the poet W.B. Yeats, beloved by both Pinter and his characters in Betrayal.
“In the Dreaming Back the Spirit is compelled to live over and over again all the events that had most moved it,” Yeats wrote. He was talking about the afterlife, where Copenhagen’s characters do their reminiscing. Though Pinter’s characters in Betrayal are very much alive, the play’s dreaming back comes after the death of a relationship. We dream back with them, sorting through the wreckage for the truth, the motivations, and the tragedies that can only be seen with the benefit of hindsight. Betrayal’s structure gives us that necessary view.
Betrayal is onstage at the Lantern January 10 through February 17, 2019. Visit our website for information and tickets.
