NO MAN'S LAND
NO MAN’S LAND, Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House, STC and QTC co-production. 1 November-11 December 2011. Photos Rob Maccoll; main pic: Steven Rooke (top), John Gaden, Peter Carroll and Andrew Buchanan.
The name Harold Pinter is one of those uttered in hushed and wondering tones by many theatre-goers. His elliptical approach to drama is famously inscrutable and no more so than in No Man’s Land. If you want clear meanings and carefully tied and snipped loose ends, this is not the play, nor the playwright, for you. However, it’s the absence of the neat and pat that makes the play and its characters interesting.
Is Hirst (John Gaden) merely a demented old literary queen who’s brought Spooner (Peter Carroll) home from the pub near Hampstead Heath out of habit, or some distant echo of his youth? Is Spooner just a mediocre poet down on his luck who’s enjoying the hospitality and liquor of his much more successful companion? Or are his reminiscences about their shared Cambridge youth part of an elaborate con on his part to ingratiate himself with a man whose house is big enough for both of them?
And what about Foster and Briggs? (Andrew Buchanan and Steven Rooke) Are they manservant and boyfriend or a pair of chancers who’ve somehow come by the keys to the castle? And is the castle – actually a library in a once elegant house where the many dusty tomes are gradually being edged out by the bar and its bottles – really Hirst’s home or a halfway house between life and death? And are the desultory happenings on a summer evening (carefully shut out by heavy drapes at the single tall window) what happen or are they in Hirst’s imagination?
Looking for answers is not the point; but considering the questions raised in your own mind probably is. The two old men, with more or less disastrous, unkind and hilarious results, consume an awful lot of whisky. For the audience, delirium tremens by association sets in long before Hirst collapses in a heap and is carted off to bed by the younger men. We are left in Spooner’s company: mysteriously locked in to the library with him and as bemused as he by the various turns of events.
Foster and Briggs are traditionally played as menacing yobbos, but in this production they are more subtle than that; more ambivalent too and therefore quite disturbingly effective. Gaden and Carroll are as you’d expect and hope. Carroll’s mastery of the poor old poet’s loquacious blether is splendid while Gaden beautifully does that thing of pleasant-unpleasant; baleful-ineffectual, which was the mark of so many Englishmen of that ilk and era (Sir Anthony Blunt for instance).
At 90 minutes straight through, the four actors keep an iron grip on one’s attention without apparent effort – which says much for their skill and conviction. It’s a perfect party piece for the two older men and, unless one is a student of theatre and/or haven’t seen it before, it’s the best reason for mounting the production. Robert Kemp’s surreal set suggests that reality and memory are as unreliable as we know them to be and the assortment of old lamps and roughly wired up lights add to that sense of rather sad make-believe.
Director Michael Gow allows the two principals to do what they do best; and the result is as fine a production as could be wished for; if that indeed is what you do wish for. Personally, I’m particularly looking forward to one of the STC’s recent commissions, which should make it to the stage in 2013; and that’s a new play by Joanna Murray Smith. I think I've had enough of English classics for the moment.
