Betrayal (Old Fitz) ★★★★

Written by Harold Pinter. Sport For Jove. Old Fitz Theatre. 18 Jul – 10 Aug, 2025.

Sport For Jove’s production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal peels back layer after layer of relationships and asks us: who can you really trust?

Emma (Ella Scott Lynch) and Jerry (Matt Hardie) meet in a pub after a few years apart. They catch up on their respective families like the old lovers they are. Emma reveals that she has just told her husband Robert (Andrew Cutcliffe) about their past affair. From this moment, a complex web of deceit unfolds as each scene takes us further back into their shared history, showing lies piling up over the years.

Does a lie hurt if it is never discovered? Emma, Jerry and Robert have been lying to each other for years. The question of who knows what, and when, drives this mannered comedy of revelations. Betrayal is funny—partly because the script’s major surprises catch us off guard, and partly because Pinter’s rhythms are so familiar they verge on self-parody.

Pinter’s cold, compassionless menace is best captured by Cutcliffe’s Robert, who seems more interested in squash and poetry than in his wife’s wellbeing. You’re left wondering where polite British reserve ends and genuine indifference begins. It’s a performance told largely through subtext—brilliant to watch. In contrast, Lynch’s Emma appears to be constantly questioning her decisions, on the verge of changing her mind at any moment, while Hardie’s Jerry moves from warm reserve at the play’s start (the end of their relationship) to reckless abandon. This emotional “three-body problem” feels inevitably destined for chaos.

Director Cristabel Sved strips the production down to near black-box simplicity. Melanie Liertz’s set design threatens to bring back the vertical blind to theatre stages in a way I haven’t seen since the 1990s (kudos to Diego Retamales, who turns opening and closing them into an art form). Lighting by Verity Hampson and Luna Ng subtly shifts the tone, transporting us from Kilburn in West London to Venice. As the play progresses, the stage becomes cluttered with the detritus of the characters’ interactions—what starts pristine ends in disorder.

Reverse chronologies can be tricky (just ask the late Stephen Sondheim). As the play unfolds, we already know the ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘what’ and ‘where’ of events; what remains unknown is the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of their relationships. The drama doesn’t lie in what happens but leaps out in the small lies that are told.

The audience must stay attuned to the micro-moments that make a Pinter play truly sing—though some are not always easy to catch. With a script full of wickedly ambiguous lines that can cut deep and an emotional tension that simmers beneath the surface, some scenes occasionally feel blunt and out of step with the characters.

Betrayal is one of my favourite Pinter plays, even more than the much-lauded The Caretaker, and it’s a joy to see it brought to life in such an intimate space. This is a real “actors’ play”, offering plenty for the performers to savour. It’s all about character, and this cast clearly revels in it. The show is very good now, and I suspect it will deepen further over the course of the run.