No Man's Land (play)

No Man's Land is a play by 2005 Nobel in Literature Laureate Harold Pinter written in 1974 and first produced and published in 1975.

Setting

"A large room in a house in North West London" on a summer night ([9]).

Characters

[From the Grove Press edition of the play:]

• Hirst, a man in his sixties
• Spooner, a man in his sixties
• Foster, a man in his thirties
• Briggs, a man in his forties

Hirst is an alcoholic upper-class man of letters who lives in an upscale house (presumed by critics to be in Hampstead) with Foster and Briggs, his purported amanuensis and man servant (or apparent body guard), respectively, who may be lovers. Spooner, whom Hirst has picked up in a tavern and invited home for a drink, becomes Hirst's house guest for the night, claims to be a poet as well and, through a contest of at least-partly fantastic reminiscences, appears to have known Hirst at university and to have shared mutual male and female acquaintances and relationships.

Plot synopsis

The first act opens with Hirst's offering a drink to Spooner, a man whom it soon appears he has picked up in a tavern and taken home: "As it is?" – that is, neat – and Spooner's reply: "As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is" (15). During the first act, Spooner claims to be a fellow poet and to have known his more illustrious host and mutual acquaintances and relationships in the past. Toward the end of act one, Hirst's keepers (quasi-body guards) "vagabond cock" Foster and Briggs seek to fend off the self-insinuating Spooner, leading Hirst "out of the room (52) and away from him. The act ends with a "Blackout" – visually demonstrating Foster's taunt: "Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this. ... He turns the light out (53).

During Act Two, in his increasingly-inebriated state, Hirst may mistake or feign recognition of Spooner as a Oxbridge classmate from the 1930s, an apparently-false impression which Spooner nevertheless encourages (68–78), leading both of them into a series of increasingly-questionable reminiscences, which Hirst finally and abruptly undercuts: "This is outrageous! Who are you? What are you doing in my house?" going on to accuse Spooner with being an impostor: "You are clearly a lout. The Charles Wetherby I knew was a gentleman. I see a figure reduced. I am sorry for you. Where is the moral ardour that sustained you once? Gone down the hatch." – allusively and both wistfully and comically combining the clichés "Gone with the wind" and "Down the hatch," after which, Briggs "enters, pours whisky and soda, gives it to" Hirst, who "looks at it" and then says, "Down the hatch. Right down the hatch. (He drinks.)" (78). Hirst proclaims, "Let us change the subject. Pause. For the last time." (91), but immediately asks, "What have I said?" That leads the characters to debate what Hirst's phrase for the last time precisely "means" (91–94), leaving all of them, according to Spooner, "in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever icy and silent." Following the illustrative "Silence", Hirst utters the play's final words and provides its final action: "I'll drink to that." and "He drinks," paralleling the opening words of the first act ("As it comes?"), and the play ends, ambiguously, with a "SLOW FADE" of lights (95).

Production history

The London première of No Man's Land, directed by Peter Hall, opened at the Old Vic Theatre (then home to the National Theatre), on 24 April 1975, starring John Gielgud as Spooner and Ralph Richardson as Hirst and with Michael Feast as Foster and Terence Rigby as Briggs. It transferred to Wyndham's Theatre, in London's West End, on 15 July 2005 (Baker and Ross xxxiii). This production transferred to Broadway, in New York City, from October through December 1976, with Richardson winning the 1977 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for his performance as Hirst. Peter Hall's production returned to the National Theatre (NT), playing at the Lyttelton Theatre, from January through February 1977. The original production with Richardson and Gielgud was filmed for the National Theatre Archive and has been shown on British television as part of Pinter at the BBC on BBC Four.

A major revival at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by David Leveaux, opened in February 1993, and starred Paul Eddington as Spooner and Harold Pinter as Hirst; Douglas Hodge played Foster and Gawn Grainger played Briggs.

In the Broadway revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company directed by David Jones, which opened on 27 February 1994 at the Criterion Centre Stage Right Theatre, in New York City, Jason Robards played Hirst, and Christopher Plummer, who was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play, played Spooner; Tom Wood and John Seitz played Foster and Briggs, respectively.

In 2001, another major revival at the NT was directed by Harold Pinter, with Corin Redgrave as Hirst, John Wood as Spooner, Danny Dyer as Foster, and Andy de la Tour as Briggs.

In the summer of 2008, a new production directed by Rupert Goold premièred at the Gate Theatre, in Dublin, with Michael Gambon (Hirst), David Bradley (Spooner), David Walliams (Foster), and Nick Dunning (Briggs); it transferred to the Duke of York's Theatre, in the West End, London, opening on 7 October 2008.

Critical reception and interpretation

In reviewing the London première, on 24 April 1975, Michael Billington, of The Guardian, observes that the play is "about precisely what its title suggests":

the sense of being caught in some mysterious limbo between life and death, between a world of brute reality and one of fluid uncertainty. ... the play is a masterly summation of all the themes that have long obsessed Pinter: the fallibility of memory, the co-existence in one man of brute strength and sensitivity, the ultimate unknowability of women, the notion that all human contact is a battle between who and whom. ... It is in no sense a dry, mannerist work but a living, theatrical experience full of rich comedy in which one speech constantly undercuts another.

Over a decade after having written The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), the first edition of his authorized biography of Pinter, Billington discusses his critical perspective on the play in his videotaped discussion for Pinter at the BBC, broadcast on BBC Four television from 26 October through 9 November 2002.." After admitting that No Man's Land is a "haunting weird play" that he himself "can never fully understand –Who can? – but it works on you", he reviews the genesis of the play's first line ("As it is?"), which came to Pinter in taxicab while riding home from dinner out alone, and the significance of the titular phrase no man's land, and finds "something of Pinter" in both characters, each one a writer, but one "with all the trappings of success but [who] is inured by fame, wealth, comfort," which Pinter himself had to some degree already become (Hirst), and the other kind of writer whom Pinter may have once feared becoming, "the struggling, marginal, the pin-striped writer" who "does not make it" (Spooner); though when Billington put his theory to Pinter, Pinter said, "Well, yes, maybe; but I've never had two man servants named Foster and Briggs."

In reviewing Goold's revival of the play at the Duke of York's Theatre in 2008, Billington points out that "Hirst, a litterateur haunted by dreams and memories, is, as he tells Spooner, 'in the last lap of a race I had long forgotten to run'. But, while his servants conspire to lead Hirst to oblivion, Spooner attempts a chivalric rescue-act, dragging him towards the light of the living. The assumption is that his bid fails, as all four characters are finally marooned in a no-man's land 'which remains forever, icy and silent'."

In this play replete with echoes of T. S. Eliot, Spooner may appear to have failed in his apparent efforts to ingratiate himself with and perhaps even to "rescue" Hirst from "drowning" himself in drink. But Spooner still remains in the house at the end of the play, "in no man's land," along with Hirst (and Foster and Briggs), and the play ends in an impasse much like that of Pinter's 1960 play The Caretaker, to which critics compare No Man's Land.

As various other critics do, Michael Coveney is still asking: "Yes, but what does it all mean? Kenneth Tynan railed against the 'gratuitous obscurity' of Harold Pinter's poetic 1975 play when it was first produced by Peter Hall at the National starring John Gielgud as the supplicant versifier Spooner and Ralph Richardson as his host Hirst, patron and supporter of the arts. But the play is always gloriously enjoyable as an off-kilter vaudeville of friendship and dependency." In the The Guardian, Billington concludes that "This is a compelling revival much aided by Neil Austin's lighting and Adam Cork's subliminal sound," observing: "when audience and cast finally joined in applauding Pinter, [who was] seated in a box, I felt it was in recognition of an eerily disturbing play that transports us into a world somewhere between reality and dream."

Both Billington and Paul Taylor (in The Independent) give the production 4 out of 5 stars, while Charles Spencer, reviewing the production in The Daily Telegraph, like other critics making inevitable comparisons with the original production, rates it as "equally fine, with Michael Gambon and David Bradley rising magnificently to the benchmark set by their illustrious predecessors," but points out that he too does not feel that he fully understands it: "Even after three decades I cannot claim fully to understand this haunting drama that proves by turns funny, scary, and resonantly poetic, but I have no doubt that it is one of the handful of indisputable modern classics that Pinter has written, and a piece that will haunt and tantalise the memory of all who see it."

References

Main article: Selected bibliography for Harold Pinter

• Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History. Comp. William Baker and John C. Ross. London: British Library, 2005. ISBN 9780712348850. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005. ISBN 9781584561569.
• Harold Pinter. No Man's Land. London: Eyre Methuen, 1975. New York: Grove Press, 1975. (Quotations above come from the Grove Press edition.)

External links

Main article: Harold Pinter § External links

• No Man's Land – Official Webpage from the "Plays" section of HaroldPinter.org, the official Website of Harold Pinter.
• "No Man's Land" – Hyperlinked BBC Four online feature for Pinter at the BBC, with link to RealMedia player video clip of Michael Billington discussing No Man's Land (2 mins., 17 secs.) [archived].
• A Pinter Primer – Guardian.co.uk photograph album (15 pictures), including some relating to No Man's Land.