UNTIL AUGUST 9, BATH: Betrayal by Harold Pinter, Theatre Royal Bath - In an interesting, and I am sure not accidental, juxaposition of plays and casting, the same three actors who romped through Noel Coward's unorthodox threesome in Design for Living, earlier in the Peter Hall season, now play out another triangular relationship.

Pinter's vision is darker, seen from the moral standpoint of almost 50 years later than Coward's play, and its infidelities are more conventional. But not the way Pinter presents them.

The play begins after the affair between Jerry and Emma is over, and takes us back through its twists and turns and revelations to the beginning. There is no interval to break the concentration.

Aden Gillett is Jerry, Janie Dee is Emma and Hugo Speer Emma's husband

Robert, who is also Jerry's best friend.

It is a cleverly crafted drama, sensitively performed by all three actors who miss none of its sharp wit and irony.

It says a great deal about the specific relationships in Pinter's usual economical way, and volumes about marriage and adultery in general.

What is left unsaid is as eloquent as what is spoken. There is pain and hurt and anger but no moralising. No-one is especially painted as the guilty party, indeed it is implied that the 'innocent' partners both had their own extra-marital agendas.

There is also a subtle inference that Jerry and Emma's affair was actually keeping Emma's marriage alive.

Her husband knew about it long before it finished.

But when the infidelity ends the marriage doesn't survive for long afterwards.

The set is intriguing a picture frame within a picture frame in which stands a pile of furniture from which the actors deftly take the props and prepare each scene. The timescale is displayed on a back screen.

It is perhaps one of Pinter's most accessible plays, with none of his frequent undercurrents of menace, but plenty of intrigue nonetheless.

This play, Noel Coward's Design for Living and D H Lawrence's Fight for Barbara, run for one more week on alternating days until August 9. They are followed by Shakespeare's As You like It .

Jo Bayne