With Betrayal, Harold Pinter has committed the strategic error of writing a comprehensible play. When—once or twice—he flirted with perspicuity before, it was in one-acters and television playlets, where contingency could be invoked as excuse. Never before in a full-length stage work had Pinter deviated into sense, and thus into that manifest triviality, if not vacuity, that the percipient few had unfailingly noted, drowned out though their dissenting was by the din of hosannas. Rightly was Noël Coward an early defender of Pinter's: Underneath the third-rate imitator of Beckett, there always lurked a second-rate Coward clone.

Betrayal, which might be more aptly entitled Self-betrayal, is Pinter's most Cowardly play, but with only a fraction of Noël's wit. It deals with a classic crypto-homosexual motif: the sharing of the same woman by two close friends. This topos figures prominently in Pinter's oeuvre…. In Betrayal, there...