Pseudish nonsense, but you have to relish Sir Ian: QUENTIN LETTS' first night review of No Man's Land

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail

Published: | Updated:

No Man's Land, by Harold Pinter, Wyndham's Theatre

Rating:

Sir Ian McKellen is the main reason to see the West End's latest revival of Harold Pinter's wearyingly absurdist 1974 play No Man's Land. 

This is one of those works admired by theatre professionals who profess to love its multi-layered meanings - whereas lay folk blink in confusion, doubting there is much meaning at all.

Sir Ian plays Spooner, a bluffer, drunk, failure, and even, allegedly, a poet. On an evening at the pub Spooner has met Hirst, a rich Hampsteadite, possibly gay, who has invited him back to his house. Cue power games and captivity.

This production is being marketed on its two theatrical knights. Sir Ian, for me, is easily the senior partner. (Pictured from left, Owen Teale, Patrick Stewart, Sean Mathias [director], Ian McKellen and Damien Molony)

This production is being marketed on its two theatrical knights. Sir Ian, for me, is easily the senior partner. (Pictured from left, Owen Teale, Patrick Stewart, Sean Mathias [director], Ian McKellen and Damien Molony)

The action happens in Hirst's library, a bow-shaped room equipped with a well-stocked drinks cabinet. Stephen Brimson Lewis's handsome design suggests Hampstead Heath beyond this room.

Pinter plays often give us a Beckettian idea of absent power - a voice down the telephone line, the awaited command from on high. It is odd that so recherche a writer, a man so keen to seem obscure, should have inveighed against opaque authority.

In Hirst (Sir Patrick Stewart), Pinter went a step further and showed us the face of the immediate boss. It is an unedifying sight. Hirst drinks himself to oblivion. 

He loses his memory. He is not worth obeying, though that is precisely what two younger characters do. Foster (Damien Molony) comes across as a pretty boy, a favoured fop. Briggs (Owen Teale) is more muscular, a valet-cum-thug. Mr Teale injects judicious stroppiness into Briggs.

This production is being marketed on its two theatrical knights. Sir Ian, for me, is easily the senior partner. Spooner, dressed in crumpled suit and disreputable gym shoes, is a greedy gasbag, initially a flatterer. 

The drink - ludicrous quantities of scotch - goes down the wrong way and his anger flares as he taunts Hirst's sex life. Later he becomes memorably pathetic, over-eager to do the bidding of Hirst the following day. 

Sir Ian's gait becomes that of a whipped spaniel. And relish the way he gobbles down an unexpected breakfast. A tramp at the Savoy.

Yet there is a strong passage in the second half when Spooner and Hirst engage in an ever-riskier game of stories about characters they claim to have known at university. 

Pinter did something similar, though funnier, in an earlier sketch called 'Trouble In The Works'. He catches (and mocks) men's refusal to be outbid when it comes to their expertise.

Vanity, conversational superiority, swagger: these are traits evident in No Man's Land and they can be savoured, even if the story is a pseudish, sometimes boring nonsense.  

 

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