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Pinter's "No
Man's Land" is the ambiguity between reality and imagination
"No Man's Land."
Written by Harold Pinter; directed by Sean Mathias.
Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th St., New York City.
212 239-6200; http://www.twoplaysinrep.com/
Opened Nov 24, 2013; closes March 30, 2014.
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar Dec 5, 2013
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| Patrick
Stewart as Hirst, Ian McKellen as Spooner. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
Harold Pinter liked to play games in his plays, teasing the audience,
suggesting facts and realities that might or might not be true. He
does this in "No Man's Land," written in 1974. It is an
acerbic commentary on human nature, with a particular bite of the
literary set.
Pinter's prickly style is well served by director Sean Mathias and
finely acted by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, with strong support
from Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley. If you like intellectual diversions
and mysteries, this play is for you.
The setting is a villa, in a strange living room enclosed in round
walls of gray squares, almost like a tomb, unusually bare except for
a silver bar, a blue/gray rug, a few chairs. Spooner (Ian McKellen)
and Hirst (Patrick Stewart), men in their sixties, are getting drunk.
Hirst, well dressed in a sports jacket, is a famous writer an essayist,
poet, man of letters. He is pretentious about how he opens his house
to poets, but not all poets. Spooner is rather shabby. Hirst apparently
picked him up at a local pub, Jack Straw's Castle in Hampstead, an
area in North London favored by prosperous writers. Spooner introduces
himself as a friend of the arts, of poetry, but his ragged persona
raises doubts about who he really is and what he does.
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| Ian
McKellen as Spooner. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
McKellen and Stewart are excellent as they embody in voice and body
movements the psychology of the over-weaning, successful rich and
the desperate, failed poor.
Pinter satirizes the musings of intellectuals. Spooner says that "there
are some people who appear to be strong, whose idea of what strength
is is persuasive, but who inhabit the idea and not the fact."
Chew on that. He thanks him for asking him in, "kindness itself"
in England and in Hampstead. That is a writer's joke. And the sarcasm
continues, that he won't stay, that his security is that he elicits
from others constant indifference. You get the feeling that you are
inhabiting an intellectual in joke.
Spooner talks about his wife. And Hirst's wife. They recall serving
tea on the lawn. Spooner asks, "What happened to our cottages?
What happened to our lawns?" He says, "We share something.
A memory of the bucolic life. We're both English." But the alcohol
takes its toll. Hirst collapses and crawls out of the room.
Two employees arrive, both rather threatening, Foster (Billy Crudup)
in a leather jacket and cockney accent, who introduces himself as
Hirst's son, which turns out not to be true; he is the housekeeper.
Then Briggs (Shuler Hensley), Hirst's secretary, in a brown leather
jacket. There's the typical Pinter menace in their talk as well as
their thuggish clothes.
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| Ian
McKellen as Spooner, Patrick Stewart as Hirst. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
Hirst comes back still drunk. Soon Foster flips a switch and all
goes black. Another threat. In the morning, Spooner, who has been
locked in the room, is served breakfast with champagne.
When Hirst returns in pinstripes, there's a new mood. He declares
that they were friends at Oxford. He says they dined at club there
in 1938. Hirst asks, "Did you have a good war?" And then
he declares crudely that that he seduced Spooner's wife. Pinter likes
to write about literary figures' betrayals, such as in his play of
that name which was inspired by his own wife-betraying affair.
Is any of it true? We don't know. But Spooner's response to what might
be termed psychological abuse is self-humiliation.
The title of the play repeats Hirst's comment that "No man's
land…does not move ….or change…or grow old…remains…forever…icy….silent.
Are they living in reality or their imaginations? Pinter doesn't want
us to know. Intriguing, although sometimes the wordplay around a mysterious
void is not altogether satisfying.
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