No Man's Land at Wyndham's Theatre

When I went to see Harold Pinter's No Man's Land in 2002 at the Oxford Playhouse, I thought it was the best play I had ever seen. Directed by the writer himself, it has stuck in my memory for a long time. So when a new production starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart was announced, I had to go.

This time I found so much more inside the play than last time. The first half hour is actually the best piece of acting I have ever seen. It is dominated by Ian McKellen's Spooner, almost a monologue. This is Pinter speaking from the heart. He always preferred poetry to any other art form, so it is no wonder that the two leads are such specialists. I concentrated on these early speeches and it was if  McKellen was bringing every poetic nuance into play. His diction is so brilliant, even in quieter moments. His delivery was out of this world.

Unfortunately the rest of the cast could not match McKellen. Patrick Stewart as Hirst would probably have been OK if there wasn't that comparison. His last speech in the first act was not as poignant as it should be: "No man's land...does not move... or change... or grow old...
remains...forever...icy...silent", before collapsing twice and finally crawling out of the room. Even the drama of his falls was overshadowed by Spooner making a note of these wonderful words for future use. Hirst gets great lines ("Tonight my friend, you find me in the last lap of a race I had long forgotten to run") but they came out rather flat.

At Oxford, Corin Redgrave was a far superior Hirst. It was he, rather than Spooner, who shone that night. I also preferred Andy de la Tour as Briggs to last nights malevolent Owen Teale. The former's Bolsover Street speech brought the house down. Teale just blustered through. I also noticed the pauses far more in Pinter's production, last night they were hardly noticeable.

However, this performance was far funnier than I remember. As well as laugh out loud moments, there were occasions when I went on quietly giggling for ages at things that struck me as hilarious.

I didn't know until I read the programme that the four characters were named after cricketers from the golden age. Even the sparring Hirst and Spooner played for Yorkshire and Lancashire respectively. But then I should not have been surprised with Pinter's love of the game. The naughty passage about bowling had the whole audience laughing. No-one could have spoken it better than McKellen.
"Tell me with what speed she swung in the air, with what velocity she came off the wicket, whether she was responsive to finger spin, whether you could bowl a shooter with her, or an off break with a leg break action. In other words, did she google"

I still can't decide whether to go and see it again, this time live in cinemas in December. It might spoil my memory of yesterday, but then I might find more that is new. As one critic put it:

To accept "No Man's Land," you should not interpret it, at least not while it's going on. That doesn't mean that you have to believe everything that's said, only in the moment of its saying. Motives and meanings are what you make them, which is part of the fun -- watching Pinter is not passive entertainment. There is no single truth, only a series of possible truths. The substance is elusive (there's no way to avoid that dread word), but the dramatic and emotional effects are palpable.