Backwards In Time Essay

“Betrayal,” a play by Harold Pinter, has a unique, backward chronology that helps convey a despairing, cynical and ironic tone. This multi-emotional atmosphere provides the audience with insight into the personalities of the infinitely complex characters. The backward element of the play allows Pinter to paint scenes and situations filled with confused emotions, skeptical ideals, and betrayals by using only a minimum amount of dialogue. It is through the situations and in the emotions of the actors by which the audience, can truly indentify and then analyze the intrinsic flaws of the characters.  
Within the opening scene of the play, Pinter gives away the “ending” by showing the audience that Jerry and Emma’s relationship had ended two years before. The conflict of the play becomes immediately evident as a result of their conversation about the affair and their respective relationships with Robert. Pinter sets up the problematic love triangle, except does not choose to show us the beginning of the problem, but rather the end. Knowing how the relationship ends, the audience is immediately forced to inquire about the relationship’s duration as a whole. Well, we know that it failed and both Emma and Jerry are miserable, but why did it happen? What could possibly have come between these two long and intimate lovers? How did the relationship even being? It is through these questions that information can be obtained and an analysis of the characters can be explored.
Throughout the rest of the play, Pinter paints eerily seemingly simplistic dialogues that, upon critical examination and interpretation, reveal an entire range of interpersonal problems, characters flaws, and warped, confused ideals. For example, through the various dialogues between Robert and Jerry, the topic of the squash game always seems to come up in their conversations. The game, here, is an example of how Pinter would use a simple and ironically absurd situation to convey both feeling and...