No Man's Land (play)

No Man's Land (play)

No Man's Land is a play by Harold Pinter written in 1974 and first produced and published in 1975. Its original production was at the Old Vic Theatre in London by the National Theatre on 23 April 1975, and it later transferred to Wyndhams Theatre, July 1975 - January 1976, the Lyttelton Theatre April–May 1976, and New York October–December, returning to the Lyttelton, January–February 1977.

Contents

Setting

"A large room in a house in North West London" on a summer night.[1]

Characters

  • Hirst, a man in his sixties
  • Spooner, a man in his sixties
  • Foster, a man in his thirties
  • Briggs, a man in his forties[1]

Hirst is an alcoholic upper-class litterateur who lives in a grand house presumed to be in Hampstead, with Foster and Briggs, respectively his purported amanuensis and man servant (or apparent bodyguard), who may be lovers.[2] Spooner, a "failed, down-at-heel poet" whom Hirst has "picked up in a Hampstead pub"[3] and invited home for a drink, becomes Hirst's house guest for the night; claiming to be a fellow poet, through a contest of at least-partly fantastic reminiscences, he appears to have known Hirst at university and to have shared mutual male and female acquaintances and relationships.[2] The four characters are named after cricket players.[4]

Plot synopsis

The first act opens with Hirst's offering a drink to Spooner: "As it is?" – that is, neat (UK) or straight (U.S.) – 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 literary 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 an 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 of 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" (95): "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 Kitchen as Foster and Terence Rigby as Briggs.[5] 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 nominated for the 1977 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for his performance as Hirst.[6] Peter Hall's production returned to the National Theatre (NT), playing at the Lyttelton Theatre, from January through February 1977.[5] 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.[7]

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.[8]

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, with Jason Robards as Hirst, Christopher Plummer (nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play) as Spooner, Tom Wood as Foster, and John Seitz as Briggs.[9]

Marquee for No Man's Land, Duke of York's Theatre, London, 30 December 2008.

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.[10]

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). Goold's production transferred to the Duke of York's Theatre, in the West End, London, opening on 7 October 2008 and closing on 3 January 2009, the week after Pinter's death (24 December 2008).[11][12][13][14]

Further information: Harold Pinter#No Man's Land at the Gate Theatre, Dublin (August 2008), and the Duke of York's Theatre, London (through 3 January 2009) and Harold Pinter#Posthumous events

"No Man's Land" will run at Artists Repertory Theatre (www.artistsrep.org) in Portland, Oregon, October 4 - November 6, 2011. The production will be directed by John Dillon.

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.[5]

Over a decade after having written The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber, 1996), the first edition of his authorised 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."[15] 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 thematic significance of the titular metaphorical phrase no man's land, and finds "something of Pinter" in both of the main characters, each one a writer whom Pinter may have to some degree feared becoming: one "with all the trappings of success but [who] is inured by fame, wealth, comfort" (Hirst); the other, "the struggling, marginal, the pin-striped writer" who "does not make it" (Spooner); though when Billington put his theory to Pinter, Pinter said (jokingly), "Well, yes, maybe; but I've never had two man servants named Foster and Briggs."[15]

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'."[2]

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.[16] 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.[3][17]

As various other critics do,[17] 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."[11] 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."[2]

Both Billington and Paul Taylor (in The Independent) give the production 4 out of 5 stars,[2][3] 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."[18]

In another feature on Goold's 2008 revival, following the responses of "three Pinter virgins" who did not understand or enjoy it ("Matilda Egere-Cooper, urban music journalist: 'Obscure and exhausting' "; "David Knott, political lobbyist: 'Don't expect to feel uplifted...' "; and "Susie Rushton, editor and columnist: 'Where's the joke?' "), the Independent's critic, Paul Taylor, reiterates his praise of No Man's Land, concluding:

Like many classic Pinter plays, "No Man's Land" is about the reaction to an intruder who threatens the status quo ante. The subtlety that gradually emerges in this play, though, is that Spooner, the seedy Prufrockian failed poet, is the alter ego of his host, the moneyed litterateur, Hirst, and that his predatory intrusion also represents an abortive attempt to reconnect Hirst to life and to his creativity and to save him from the bitter stalemate of old age. Mysterious, bleakly beautiful and very funny, "No Man's Land" demonstrates that though it may take a little while to latch on to the laws of Pinterland, it is well worth the effort.[19]

Notes

  1. ^ a b Harold Pinter, No Man's Land (New York: Grove, 1975) [n. pag., 8–9]. (Subsequent parenthetical page references throughout are to this ed.)
  2. ^ a b c d e Michael Billington (2008-10-08). "No Man's Land". Guardian.co.uk (Culture, Stage, Theatre). Guardian Media Group. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/oct/08/pinter. Retrieved 2008-10-10. 
  3. ^ a b c Paul Taylor (2008-10-09). "No Man's Land, Duke of York, London" (Web). The Independent. Independent News & Media. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre/reviews/no-mans-land-duke-of-york-london-955395.html. Retrieved 2008-10-23. 
  4. ^ (Billington, Harold Pinter 245–46)
  5. ^ a b c "No Man's Land". HaroldPinter.org. http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_nomansland.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-09. "First produced at the Old Vic, Waterloo by the National Theatre, 23 April 1975 transferred to Wyndhams Theatre July 1975 - January 1976 Lyttleton Theatre April -May 1976 - New York (see foreign) October - December 1976 Lytt[el]ton Theatre January -February 1977." 
  6. ^ "No Man's Land (Richardson and Gielgud)" (photograph). Guardian.co.uk. Guardian Media Group. 2008-10-09. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2008/oct/09/pinter.theatre?picture=338431755. Retrieved 2008-10-10. 
  7. ^ "No Man's Land". BBC Four. 2002-10-26. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/pinter/pinter-classics.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-10.  There is a related video clip of Pinter's official biographer Michael Billington discussing the play as part of the online features relating to Pinter at the BBC (2 mins., 17 secs.).
  8. ^ "No Man's Land – 1993". HaroldPinter.org. 2000–2003. http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_nomansland4.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-10. 
  9. ^ "No Man's Land – Roundabout Theatre Company, Criterion Centre Stage Right, 27th January, 1994". HaroldPinter.org. 2000–2003. http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/frn_nomansland_us94.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-10. 
  10. ^ "No Man's Land – 2001". HaroldPinter.org. http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_nomansland5.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-10. 
  11. ^ a b Michael Coveney (2008-10-09). "No Man's Land (Duke of York's)" (Web). What's On Stage. whatsonstage.com. http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8821223458228&title=No+Man's+Land. Retrieved 2008-10-23. 
  12. ^ BWW News Desk (2008-11-10). "Photo Flash: NO MAN'S LAND at the Duke of York....Photos by Jeremy Whelehan" (Web). BroadwayWorld.com. Wisdom Digital Media. http://broadwayworld.com/article/Photo_Flash_NO_MANS_LAND_at_the_Duke_of_York_20000101. Retrieved 2008-11-11. 
  13. ^ "Friends Bid Pinter Farewell" (Web). BBC News (BBC). 2009-01-01. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7805812.stm. Retrieved 2009-01-04. 
  14. ^ "West End Pays Tribute to Pinter" (Web). BBC News (BBC). 2008-12-27. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7800829.stm. Retrieved 2009-01-04.  (Includes video clip.)
  15. ^ a b Michael Billington (2002-12-23). "No Man's Land" (RealVideo clip). Pinter at the BBC. BBC Four. Archived from the original on 2002-12-23. http://web.archive.org/web/20021223085200/http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/pinter/video/nomansland.ram. Retrieved 2008-10-10. 
  16. ^ Susan Hollis Merritt. " 'HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME': Pinter Past, Pinter Present, and Pinter Future". In Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 2003 and 2004. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 2004. pp. 61–82; 63 & 63 n. 10 (75).  (Considers the significance of the allusions to works by T. S. Eliot, such as the Four Quartets, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and The Waste Land, "in the verbal imagery of the two dueling former and/or would-be poets in No Man's Land.")
  17. ^ a b Mark Espiner (2008-10-09). "What to say about ... No Man's Land" (Web). Guardian.co.uk (Stage). Guardian Media Group. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/oct/09/pinter.no.mans.land.reviews. Retrieved 2008-10-09. "Couldn't get to the revival of Pinter's classic but need to save face with your friends? Mark Espiner rounds up the reviews." 
  18. ^ Charles Spencer (2008-10-08). "Review: No Man's Land" (Web). The Daily Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/08/btpinter108.xml. Retrieved 2008-10-23. 
  19. ^ "What's the Fuss about Pinter?" (Web). Independent.co.uk. Independent News & Media. 2008-10-23. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/whats-the-fuss-about-pinter-969623.html. Retrieved 2008-10-23. "The Nobel Laureate's No Man's Land has earned rave reviews. But what do three Pinter virgins – and our critic – make of it?" 

References

Further information: Bibliography for Harold Pinter

External links

Main article: Harold Pinter#External links
v · d · eHarold Pinter
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  • Applicant
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  • God's District
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Screenplays
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v · d · eDrama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience (1976–2000)

The Norman Conquests (1976) · John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson for No Man's Land (1977) · Estelle Parsons for Miss Margarida's Way (1978) · InterArt Theatre for Request Concert (1981) · The Garden of Earthly Delights (1985) · The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1986) · Cirque du Soleil (1991) · Blue Man Group for Tubes (1992) · Fool Moon (1993) · The Waste Land (1997) · Charlie Victor Romeo (2000)
Complete list · (1976–2000) · (2001–2025)

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