![]() ‘We go on betraying, don’t we?’ … Joan Bakewell. “Here am I telling you about it?” What she didn’t reveal was that she had written a play of her own in response to Pinter’s. “But we go on betraying, don’t we?” she said. She also felt that “betrayal” was a judgmental word. She told me she had been upset when Pinter first sent her a copy of Betrayal because it read like a diary of their relationship. If I know a little more than most about the matter it is because, when I wrote a biography of Pinter in the 1990s, I interviewed Joan Bakewell who broke the news of the affair. ![]() Pinter at the time was married to Vivien Merchant, and Joan to Michael Bakewell who had directed several Pinter plays on radio. From 1962 to 1969 Pinter and Bakewell had a clandestine affair. Bakewell’s play was lighter in texture than Pinter’s but deftly told the story from her perspective and raised fascinating questions about the frustrations of bourgeois marriage. The other was Joan Bakewell’s Keeping in Touch, written in response to Pinter’s play which used details of the couple’s seven-year affair. You could hardly have a better demonstration of that than in two plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday. “Truth in drama is forever elusive,” said Harold Pinter in his lecture on receiving the Nobel prize for literature.
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