NO MAN'S LAND. To 3 January.
London.
NO MAN’S LAND
by Harold Pinter.
Duke of York’s Theatre To 3 January 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat & 21, 28 Oct, 18 Nov, 2, 23, 30 Dec 2.30pm.
no performance 24, 25 Dec.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
TICKETS: 0844 847 1545.
www.nml-westend.com (£3 transaction fee).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 October.
Poetic meditation on the sense of isolation.
“Colonel Lancer? One of the Bengal Lancers?” inquires successful literary man Hirst, mid-conversation in his Hampstead home. But the routine pun comes wrapped in complexity in Harold Pinter’s most enigmatic, and last full-length*, play, from 1974.
Gone is the working-class milieu of earlier plays. Like 1970’s Old Times, No Man’s Land is set in an affluent world such as might be uneasily inhabited by a once-working class, now-successful playwright. And, as Michael Gambon’s Hirst says, edging awkwardly towards the big window with its view on the top of the social world, he is in a no man’s land.
The military implications of the title fit with the Bengal Lancers, but there’s no military order here. And Pinter's underlying patterns haven’t changed, as the casting of David Bradley in the role of Spooner indicates. A fine Davies in Sheffield Crucible’s recent Caretaker, Bradley is again the shabby indigent, making claims about his own life while latching on to the nearest property-owner.
It’s not caretaker, but secretary he seeks to be here, bringing, with his claimed literary credentials, a scruffy haughtiness as he sits eating breakfast, chin assertively munching. And there’s the careful exactitude of his phrasing, suggesting a man repeatedly having to claim a role in life.
In contrast, Gambon provides Hirst with this actor’s mix of assertion – he can roar commands – and sudden vulnerability. It makes Hirst’s collapse to the floor arise naturally from the character, as Gambon creates the sense of vacancy around his current, stagnant success.
The background Spooner fills in is suitably poetic, Bradley crisply delivering generalised lines recalling Eliot or Auden in manner (the title’s included in a speech which recurs like a refrain in each act). As his staff, there to serve Hirst or to supervise him, Nick Dunning provides Briggs with a mix of silky servitude and violence. David Walliams establishes Foster’s youth by the side of the others, though in the first act he gives an uneasy, all-purpose Pinter menace performance.
Giles Cadle’s set gives the room a feel of the public bar, such as Spooner regularly inhabits, in a play where alcohol can only be increasing the characters’ enigmatic sense of isolation.
* There was Betrayal in 1978, but that’s often given without interval and can run at 80 minutes. So it’s borderline. The Proust Screenplay was 2000 but an adaptation of an earlier work.
Hirst: Michael Gambon.
Spooner: David Bradley.
Foster: David Walliams.
Briggs: Nick Dunning.
Director: Rupert Goold.
Designer: Giles Cadle.
Lighting: Neil Austin.
Sound/Music: Adam Cork.
Assistant director: Jeremy Whelehan.
Lighting associate: Victoria Brennan.
Sound associate: Sebastian Frost.
2008-10-13 12:11:21