Verbal assault
Lloyd Evans
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 electricblue 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.
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 crackwhore 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. ❑
Previous page
