Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 31, 2008
There are two moments in ‘No Man’s Land’ that are great theatre. Late in the first act, Michael Gambon, playing Hirst, a writer of apparent high class and distinction, lapses into a drunken, maudlin reminiscence. He is haunted by the dream from which he has just woken, of a drowning. “There’s a gap in me”, he cries, “I can’t fill it… They’re blotting me out. Who is doing it? I’m suffocating.” His words, as befits somebody still mired in half-sleep, and drink sodden, are barely coherent. But the fear is very real, and it shoots through his character and the play: it is, it seems, the age-old fear of abandonment – of being a fraud and, worse, being a solitary fraud.
Later, as the play dies, the dream returns to him, though this time the fear is submerged. In the dream, he thinks he has seen someone drowning, but when he arrives at the spot, there is nothing there. His companion through the play, the itinerant raconteur-poet, Spooner (David Bradley), repeats to him a refrain from earlier: “You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever icy and silent.” The lights dim, slowly. There is a pause. Gambon raises his drink, with steel in his eyes. “I’ll drink to that”, he says. It goes dark. It goes cold. The applause starts, and then cheering and ovation. But the moment lingers. The ease with which Hirst suppresses his terror is more unsettling than the fear itself.
There is much more that is striking about this play. The comic absurdity of many of the fast-paced two-hander scenes, and of some of the monologues. The starkly beautiful writing of some of the more cryptic monologues. The rootless identities of the characters, and their dislocated narratives.
These are all vintage Pinter. But in that, there lies a problem. Absurdity, when predictable, becomes banal. Pinter, like Beckett before him, has so shaped the artistic idiom of those that came after him that the devices that he created risk being rendered impotent. I spoke, during the interval, with somebody who remembered the original production of ‘No Man’s Land’, directed by Peter Hall and starring Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, in 1975. She said what she remembered was the sense of excitement. This production has no excitement about it. Instead, it has a sense of reverence, of homage. Michael Gambon and, in particular, David Bradley, are superb. Rupert Goold’s direction is precise. Giles Cadle’s stage and Neil Austin’s lighting are absolutely apt. This seems a close-to-definitive production, surely an apt thing to present to the author himself (who attended on opening night). But homage sits uneasily with Pinter: it takes a moment of emotional tour de force from Gambon, and an unsettling final scene, to break through the sense that we have all come to pay our respects.
Harold Pinter, according to a recent article by Louise East, did not know who David Walliams was, nor what was ‘Little Britain’. That seems appropriate. Though Walliams’s presence will help sell this production in the more difficult market of the West End, there is nothing remarkable about his performance. He and Nick Dunning – whether by director’s design, or through their own efforts, isn’t clear – are the production’s Achilles heel. As a pair of hard jaws in the employ of Gambon’s character, the overt menace of their characters seems contrived and clichéd. Dunning peels off a pair of leather gloves at one point, and slaps one into the other, and smirks. It feels like a shot from a bad British gangster movie. Both relax as the production progresses, and by the end the seams in the ensemble, between them and the pairing of Gambon and Bradley, are not so evident, suggesting that as the production matures, they might find a more comfortable rhythm.
This is fine theatre, and shrewd by Michael Colgan: the Gate has by now presumably established itself internationally as the foremost producer of Pinter’s work. But artistic importance and artistic urgency are different things. Pinter is the former; this work, at least, is not the latter. When your work becomes an adjective, it augurs poorly for the prospects of it being staged in a way that surprises. The challenge now is for somebody to find a way of doing Pinter that is not Pinteresque.