["Betrayal"] is curiously thinnish Pinter, containing few of the usual Pinter hints that behind the banal domestic chitter-chatter of our time lies some irremediable Original Sin of incommunication, older, perhaps, than Adam and Eve. The play runs backward, from 1977 to 1968, but little illumination is furnished by this device: the three characters with whom the play is concerned change scarcely at all over those nine years. Though they gain a certain amount of information about one another, this information is fastidiously circled around rather than learned from…. This is a comedy in which everyone's feelings are forever being hurt, invariably for selfish reasons; though the characters are approaching early middle age, their emotions are not much above the nursery level…. (pp. 55-6)

Brendan Gill, "Looking Back," in The New Yorker (© 1980 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LV, No. 48, January 14, 1980, pp. 55-6.∗