IT is uncanny how often the root of everything in modern culture is traced to the Sixties, the decade that rendered incapable of remembering if you were there, the one others endlessly want to re-live, because it was so much better. Or so myth has it.

Everything goes back to the Sixties, 1968 to be precise, in Harold Pinter's backwards-winding study of loss and discovery, lies and deceit, that starts in a pub in the spring of 1977, two years after Emma's affair with Jerry, best friend of her husband and fellow publisher Robert, had withered on the vine of indifference.

Normally, flashback theatre progresses in a forward-moving direction. Not so here. What you watch is Pinter unpicking relationships through piling up more revelations the further he goes back in time, in other words the exact opposite to the reality of how the relationships were lived out.

The accumulative effect is to make 1968's first shoots of the affair – the beginning at the play's end – as bleak as a starless night.

"You're lovely, I'm crazy about you. All those words I'm using, don't you see, they've never been said before," says Jerry (Mark Hesketh) to a mini-skirted Emma (Amanda Ryan) in the final scene in Robert (Mason Phillips) and Emma's bedroom at a 1968 party, where Jerry makes his move.

Except that these words have so often been said before. Pinter is holding up a mirror to a pattern of behaviour that he knew only too well from his own "extramaritals" that "inspired" the play.

In the words of sage sourpuss Elvis Costello, it is a deep, dark, truthful mirror, but it is humorous too, admittedly of a black hue, but humorous nonetheless, although the press night audience seemed strangely reluctant to laugh aloud, as if inhibited by Pinter's reputation for gloom and doom.

Humans don't learn from the mistakes of others; they just don't. We are destined to repeat history, his story and her story, but the point here is that those stories don't always align. Amid all the lies and deceit, there can be two different versions of the truth, two different sets of recollections that nevertheless end up with the same denouement, but the differing recollections say everything about each individual. Maybe it comes down to self-preservation, self-justification, because ultimately they lie as much to themselves as to each other.

All this is played out in Juliet Forster's typically astute production with the weight thrown on the words, the hidden meanings – "I don't think I don't love you," says Jerry, in the coup de grace moment – and of course the Pinter-patented pauses, pregnant with significance, performed by a cast at the top of their game playing.

Each character – probably even Tom Jackson's Italian waiter – knows more than they let on, and the audience knows even more.

Dawn Allsopp's set, rearranging the furniture whether for London houses, a restaurant or Venice, evokes each place but a blurring of memory too: a brilliant design for this premium-grade Pinter.

Betrayal, York Theatre Royal, until October 18. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk