January 3 1976: Pinter, No Man’s Land
Wyndham’s Theatre, matinee (5:00 pm). Directed by Peter Hall
The National Theatre production. Two old men, Spooner (John Gielgud) and Hirst (Ralph Richardson), fellow university graduates, run into each other at Jack Straw’s, the pub at the top of Hampstead Heath. Spooner, a down-at-heels poet, accompanies Hirst, a successful and famous essayist, critic, and poet, back to Hirst’s luxurious Hampstead house. There, in the imposing drawing room, in a night session (Act I) and a morning session (Act II) the past is re-opened, identities are disclosed, the terms of battle defined, and the war declared. Inevitably, the battle takes place in territory up for dispute, a kind of no man’s land.
The issue is, who will gain power, gain control — here, control over the life, or what’s left of it, of Hirst, who drinks himself unconscious in the first act and repeatedly approaches the threshold of impropriety, though all the while exhibiting a vigorous presence such as only Richardson can portray. The contestants are Spooner, the interloper from the past, a seedy-elegant seizer of the main chance, and two young men of shadowy identity who seem to be hired bodyguards doubling, somewhat ineptly, as housekeeper and cook for Hirst, whose person becomes effectively the no man’s land of the title. They are extremely possessive of him, regarding him as somehow theirs, and consequently extremely resentful of Spooner’s efforts to worm his way in. It is all visited with that vague air of menace that Pinter can generate so masterfully. The ending, in which Gielgud’s Spooner has a long speech, almost declamatory, elucidates the nature of the contest, describing the battleground as a sort of “no man’s land” and serving to bring the play to a stop. — Not an end, exactly, but a moment’s pause, a deep breath, before the inevitable fray.
The familiar Pinteresque long prose tale is here, of course: the story told by a character, often a propos of nothing in particular, a straightforward commonplace event that ends up as a little genre piece about violence (psychological or physical) and dominance (imagined or real). To this sort of set speech Pinter has added another kind less easy to define — a sort of self-exposition that tells “who I am” without really giving away “what I am,” what the character’s motives are. That is, it’s another technique based on Pinter’s observations of people asserting themselves by seemingly being open, condescending, careless, even downright friendly, but always playing from some reserve of hidden strength — or anxiety.
Gielgud is supremely good, a joy to watch, having learned as a baby how to mark each word or phrase for just the maximum meaning and effect without ever slipping into a “marked for notice” mode. An almost perfect match of actor and role, despite the odds against thinking of Gielgud as right for Pinter or vice versa. Did Pinter write the role of Spooner for Gielgud? Very possibly. Richardson in his