Geordie Brookman's production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal is a grand outing for a deeply absorbing and complex piece about deceptions and relationships.

Emma (Alison Bell) is married to Robert (Mark Saturno), but having an affair with Jerry (Nathan O'Keefe). The play tracks the life and death of the affair across the years between 1977 and 1968. Events do not happen chronologically and logically. And it is worth being reminded that Harold Pinter just about invented the long pause.

This might sound excruciating but it's actually darkly funny and sad. The characters might be living (mostly) in the seventies but any sense of a joyful sexual revolution is smothered by guilt and a fear of being caught out.

And around them there is an awareness of the children in the various marriages who regardless of the adults' relationships simply seem to be getting on with growing up.

Pinter's English middle class characters, who work at jobs in art galleries and publishing and writing, are just as prone to convoluted worries and aggressive obsessive imaginings as his lower class lost souls whose employment and happiness prospects seem much less.

Bell's Emma is perhaps the calmest, struck by the tensions of deception and saddened by the end of an affair but pragmatically making the best of the relationships that come her way.

O'Keefe's Jerry is anxious and deeply romantic at heart and prone to competition with Saturno's squash-playing obsessed Robert.

There's always a bit of menace in Pinter and it's Saturno that supplies it.

But restraint is all and nobody comes to blows in Betrayal. Even the waiter (John Maurice) rolls with the snappiness of the customers. Yet this production makes you ache for these people who can never quite express what they want or need.

Geoff Cobham's towering circular set and moments of purposefully invasive lighting creates an abstract but unsettling surrounding for all the domestic tragedy that takes place in the pub, in the office, in the restaurant, in the bedroom.

Set changes are covered by the rumbling movement of a huge circular clothes rack that also adroitly covers the Canberra winter coughs that break out between scenes. No one would dare cough in a Pinter pause and this production produces some beauties.

Harold Pinter's been seen rather rarely in Canberra in recent years. For those who relish his disturbing brand of theatre this production of Betrayal is very welcome.

The cast treads lightly and the humour comes through but the outcomes, in true Pinter fashion, sit somewhat heavily on the soul.