January 9, 2002: Pinter, No Man’s Land
National Theatre, Lyttelton, Matinee. Directed by Pinter. Corin Redgrave as Hirst, John Wood as Spooner.
I had the great good luck to see the original Wyndham’s Theatre production of this play in 1976 with Richardson as Hirst and Gielgud as Spooner. The hardest of acts to follow, but Redgrave and Wood are, quite independent of their predecessors, their own men and completely convincing. They offer fascinating, broadly stated, telling performances. The play retains all of its mystery and obscurity, and all of its humor, along with the lucid language of a master craftsman at the top of his form. These actors and their two able accomplices, Danny Dyer as Foster and Andy de la Tour as Biggs, are capable of the no-holds-barred bravura style that Pinter implanted in the text and that, as director, he has encouraged Redgrave and Wood to emulate. A marathon drinking bout turns out to be a sustained struggle for power that ends in a kind of draw, with Spooner’s easy comment on such struggles as taking place in a no man’s land where shifting allegiances occur and take place without warning and where no one can feel secure.
The term is drawn, of course, from the experience of the Great War, where the territory between the two entrenched enemies was called a “no man’s land,” a land held and possessed by no one — or at least by no one for long. I think the term must have had wide currency in the Second War — a likelihood pointed to by Hirst’s question to Spooner after they both divulged that they had been in it: “Did you have a good war?”
Corin Redgrave is a remarkably handsome man, on whom no Bond Street apparel would be wasted. He acts — as an actor and as the character of Hirst — as if to the manor born. But he does not hold his liquor especially well, and we see him drink himself to the point of collapse, twice. The fall he takes, stage center, from a fully standing position, was every bit as good as Richardson’s (even if Richardson was taller) and yet all his own: he even falls in the full bravura style. He has a certain relaxed manner that speaks of generations of good breeding at only the best schools. For a good while we think that he is sure to best Spooner, a seedy ne’er-do-well of a failed poet reduced to clearing tables at a Chalk Farm pub; but Spooner turns out to be a match for him.
Wood’s ruddy-faced Spooner, despite his baggy, unkempt clothes and appearance, has linguistic gifts at least equal to his opponent’s. Clearly, Pinter wrote these two characters to be a match for one another, and implicit in this is the requirement for casting two actors of equal talent and self-sufficient style. Woods’s Spooner is sometimes momentarily at a loss, and we see his face light up and gleam with surprise. But the moment swiftly turns into his brilliant response; the resulting can-you-top-this? back-and-forth holds the audience in rapt silence for remarkably long stretches of time.
A sumptuous set, as grand as any posh