No Man's Land (play)

"A large room in a house in North West London" on a summer night and the following morning. ==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 Spooner, a "failed, down-at-heel poet" whom Hirst has "picked up in a Hampstead pub" 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 male and female acquaintances and relationships. It has been suggested that Spooner was originally inspired by the poet Eddie Linden, whom Pinter knew. ==Plot synopsis==

Act 1 In the 1970s, Hirst, an ageing man of means begins a night of heavy drinking in his drawing room with an anonymous peer whom he only just met at a pub. Hirst's talkative and somewhat disheveled guest, calling himself a poet, long-windedly explains how he is penetratingly perceptive, until he finally introduces himself as "Spooner". The pair becomes increasingly intoxicated, Hirst remaining quiet as Spooner rambles on, culminating in his taunting Hirst's masculinity and wife. Suddenly, Hirst rises and throws his glass, merely commenting "No man's land...does not move...or change...or grow old...remains...forever...icy...silent", before collapsing twice and crawling out of the room. Two domestic employees of Hirst's, younger men named Foster and Briggs, enter, talk aimlessly, and question Spooner, who now becomes the softspoken man in the room. Eventually, Hirst reenters and struggles to remember a recent dream. All are now drinking, and Hirst mentions an album of photographs he keeps, commenting on the appearances of the people in the album. He does not seem to remember Spooner's identity, insisting that his true friends are kept safely in the album. Becoming less and less coherent, Hirst continues to ponder his dream—involving someone drowning—when Spooner abruptly says that he was the one drowning in the dream. Hirst drunkenly collapses again and Spooner now rushes in to Hirst's aid, brushing away the two younger men and claiming to be Hirst's true friend. The younger pair becomes defensive and accusatory, asserting their obligation to protect Hirst against "men of evil". Briggs helps Hirst out of the room, and Foster concludes to Spooner, "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 flicks off the lights, causing a blackout. Act 2 Alone the next morning, Spooner stands from his chair and attempts to leave, but the door is locked. Briggs, Hirst's manservant, soon enters; he delivers food and champagne, ignores Spooner's queries about the locked door, and calls the other men poets. Hirst himself then bursts in, delighted to see Spooner, whom he strangely mistakes for, or pretends is, an old friend. He speaks as though he and Spooner were Oxbridge classmates in the 1930s, and the two bizarrely discuss scandalous romantic encounters they had with the same women, leading to a series of increasingly questionable reminiscences and ending with Spooner directly accusing Hirst of having an affair with his wife. Hirst separately launches into a rant about once-known faces in his photo album, and all four men are soon present once more, drinking champagne. An odd dynamic emerges where Spooner first pities the younger men's employment but then ends up requesting employment from Hirst himself. After all this, Hirst merely replies "Let's change the subject for the last time", which he instantly regrets, since this is taken to mean that Hirst will be unable to change the subject ever again. He thinks back to his youth, when he mistakenly thought he saw a drowned body in a lake. Spooner now comments, "No. You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent." Hirst responds "I'll drink to that!" and the lights fade slowly to black. ==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 1975 (Baker and Ross xxxiii). This production transferred to the Longacre Theatre in New York 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. Peter Hall's production returned to the National Theatre (NT), playing at the Lyttelton Theatre, from January through February 1977. The production was also recorded and released by Caedmon Records and was nominated for a Grammy Award. A major revival at the Almeida Theatre that later transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre (called the Comedy Theatre at the time), London, directed by David Leveaux, opened in February 1993, and starred Paul Eddington as Spooner and Pinter himself 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, 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. , 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. In the summer of 2008, a 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 on 24 December 2008. A production directed by Sean Mathias opened at Berkeley Rep in August 2013, with Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley. It opened on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre (then called the Cort Theatre), in repertory with Waiting for Godot, on 24 November 2013 (previews began on 31 October 2013). It closed on 30 March 2014. It was restaged in the UK in 2016, with Owen Teale and Damien Molony replacing Hensley and Crudup. It played at the Sheffield Lyceum, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Brighton Theatre Royal and Cardiff New Theatre before transferring to Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End from September to December 2016. The play was staged as the closing production of Steppenwolf Theatre Company's 2022-2023 season in Chicago, under the direction of Les Waters with theatre co-founder Jeff Perry (American actor) playing Hirst. ==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. 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 a 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." 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, 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 Independents critic, Paul Taylor, reiterates his praise of ''No Man's Land'', concluding: What is less clear is the purpose of the play's undercurrent of homosexuality. In the opening scene there are repeated references to scopophilia and Spooner asks Hirst if he often hangs "around Hampstead Heath" and the pub Jack Straw's Castle, both notorious for homosexual activity in the 1960s and ‘70s. Most analysts have tended to ignore this subtext but it is there. With this and lines with double meaning like "You had a cottage?" as well as oblique but explicit references to baleful mothers, "quaint little perversions", women "especially in Siam or Bali", "Lord Lancer", a man called Bunty and male virginity, it seems likely that Pinter is playing a joke of some kind on more naive critics and admirers. ==Notes==