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Friday 9 January 2009

Verbal assault

No Man’s Land
Duke of York’s

Mine
Hampstead

Slow, fractured, monumental, ineluctable, No Man’s Land lurches at you like a disintegrating ice shelf. The first act opens with two drunks staggering around a Hampstead mansion downing whisky and making oblique statements of self-revelation. Spooner, a broken-down poet, has been invited home by Hirst, a millionaire author on the verge of mental collapse. They appear to be strangers. When Hirst’s two manservants, Briggs and Foster, carry him off to bed they turn on Spooner and try to intimidate him. But Spooner has nothing to lose — ‘I have never been loved; from this I derive my strength’ — and brushes aside their menaces. Cut to the following morning. Spooner is unchanged, Hirst transformed. Sober, vibrant, and sheathed head to toe in a suit of electric-blue pin-stripes, he comes bounding into the room and engages Spooner (whom he now recognises) in 20 minutes of dazzlingly filthy repartee, in which each reveals a succession of faithless liaisons involving the other’s wives, friends, cousins and lovers.

Excellent verbal screwball. Thereafter the play becomes less obscure, but less energetic. Spooner begs Hirst for a permanent post in his household and Hirst’s reply is, of course, perfectly opaque. A decidedly weird night in the theatre, often funny, sometimes frustratingly tedious. Director Rupert Goold orchestrates Pinter’s mad-house with a mercifully light touch. Michael Gambon brings his habitual comic magnificence to the role of Hirst. His co-star David Walliams, a fine and charismatic actor, offers nothing here that we haven’t seen already on TV, so his Foster seems out of place, a muted version of a Little Britain caricature. The night’s honours belong to David Bradley playing the only rounded and legible character, Spooner. Thin as fuse-wire and with the sly, shrivelled face of an amused lizard, Bradley is a blend of improbable rarities, antiquarian eloquence and indomitable seediness.

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