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Friday 9 January 2009

Verbal assault

No Man’s Land
Duke of York’s

Mine
Hampstead

Without doubt, this is the West End’s must-see show of the autumn but it’s worth noting that the London audience is only interested in Pinter as a comic icon. Essentially, he’s a music-hall turn. The inscrutability, the ‘high-brow’ tag, the laborious seriousness with which he’s treated in Europe, even the Nobel Prize are all part of the act, the intellectual equivalent of the spinning bow-tie and gaudy pantaloons of the vaudeville star.

No chance of Polly Teale becoming a comic icon. Her new drama Mine opens with a pair of infertile yuppies receiving news that a baby has been found for them to adopt. The tot’s mum is a homeless crack-whore who was covered in bruises when she gave birth, yet the authorities promise her that if she kicks the drugs she’ll retain custody of baby. Mm. Social services might have some explaining to do there. Meanwhile, the hopeful yuppies turn out to be London’s least suitable adoptive couple. Dad’s a career-obsessed architect busy on a project in Switzerland. Mum’s an alcoholic TV presenter whose work takes her to Japan and New York. God help the poor baby.

The core of the play is Posh Mum’s struggle to accept that her maternal urges are being fulfilled at the cost of Chav Mum’s loss. But Teale continually halts the action to give us a glimpse of their unconscious lives. Not good. Every time a character has a dream the audience has a nightmare. Throughout the play a white-skirted little girl representing hurt innocence keeps moping on to the stage against a video projection of verdant forests while wind-chime lullabies go plinkety plonk. Ooh dear. There’s the odd flash of levity from the Lithuanian housekeeper, Katya, a wise soul untroubled by bourgeois anxieties or personal pronouns. ‘Listen to Katya. Katya have fife childreen, all happy, healthy, do as they toll.’ But Teale soon exhausts her interest in child-angst and casts about for fresh sources of deluxe distress. ‘We hurry home to our own little universe. Close the door. Hope no one comes wanting donations for Amnesty or Shelter.’

This is an ultra-feminised guilt-odyssey, a remorse-o-matic festival of shame and to stand any chance of enjoying it your sympathies need to be in tune with the world outlook of the central character, a sententious, broody, wannabe mum lounging in a squillion-quid mansion who starts off mewling lines of rhapsodic sentimentality — ‘she’s here, somewhere in this city, in the dark, breathing, alive’ — and ends up getting hammered and sobbing, ‘there are rivers in China full of our rubbish,’ into her fair-trade Chilean Pinot Noir. The show is about to set off on a tour of the nation’s regional guilt capitals. Take some Kleenex. Recycled.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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