It's baffling to know who to trustworthiness for the stunning success of the production of Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land" that has come to the Duke of York's Theatre from the Gate Theatre, Dublin. Rupert Goold's supervision (he's keen from late triumphs with "Macbeth" and his thrillingly inventive manifestation of "Six Characters in Search of an Author") certainly helps us confer with this is superior Pinter. But Giles Cadle's notable set of a extravagant Hampstead apartment, with its museum-quality bibelots and except boasting 57 varieties of booze, sets the tone, too, for note-perfect performances by the four actors.
Michael Gambon is Hirst, the cavernously wrinkled-faced, best-selling author who occupies the garden apartment and who, though he drinks himself jackass (Mr. Gambon gives us a superior front-of-stage fall) in the summer tenebriousness of Act I, is miraculously bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning. David Bradley plays the equally aged, equally dipsomaniac Spooner, a shabby, drained would-be minstrel picked up by Hirst in a joint on Hampstead Heath who is also watchful in the forenoon of Act 2, though he's been locked in and unnatural to allot the tenebrosity in a chair.
He's even got enough of an fondness to tuck into a convincing breakfast and thieve a piece of toast for later. His jailers are Hirst's menacing, gangsterish, Cockney-accented servants: Foster, played coolly as the smoother, more unmistakably brilliant one by David Walliams (of TV's "Little Britain" in his premier "straight theater" role); and Briggs, played by Nick Dunning, as the one who delivers the Pinteresquely long-drawn-out road-directions monologue while shimmering with suppressed violence. The badinage of the instant half, in which the two broken-down men seem to seat that one of them scarf the other's girl, under Goold's regulation serves as a rule to occasion out the vivid subtext of the action -- not so evident in the unusual 1974 production. Is any of it true? Have they even ever met before? The only fetish that seems shining in these couple of hours, whose murkiness is pierced solely by the distinctively enjoyable sharpness of the dialogue, is that the two primordial codgers are going to die. So are we.
With cold-blooded humor, "No Man's Land" shows what a frightening consideration that is.
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