Gamesmanship Galore

By T.E. Kalem

NO MAN'S LAND

By HAROLD PINTER

Over the years it has gradually become the mark of the philistine to search for the meaning of a Pinter play. Presumably one may compound the charge of philistinism by suggesting that No Man's Land is substantially meaningless. This does not prevent it from being eruptively funny, elegiacally melancholy and wonderfully literate.

A rich old man of letters named Hirst (Ralph Richardson) has struck up an acquaintance in a pub with a poor seedy poet of approximately his own age named Spooner (John Gielgud). He has brought Spooner home to a sumptuous drawing room, designed by John Bury. There, Spooner holds forth on art and life and sundry other topics very much in the non-sequiturish fashion of the theater of the absurd. Hirst chugalugs drink after drink till he crawls off to bed on his hands and knees.

But before that happens two other characters appear on the scene. Foster (Michael Kitchen) and Briggs (Terence Rigby) are young, uncouth and vaguely sinister. They are apparently Hirst's factotums about the house, and his bodyguards. They aim insulting remarks at Spooner. While he is slightly intimidated, Spooner holds on like a barnacle, secure in the doggedly smug conviction of his genius despite his worldly failure. In retaliation, the bodyguards immerse Spooner in total darkness by switching off the lights and locking him in the drawing room for the night.

A transformation occurs in Act II the following morning. Hirst bounds into the room and greets Spooner as a long-lost classmate and friend from Oxford. As they reminisce, the talk turns to sex. Hirst reveals that he had seduced Spooner's wife and enjoyed her as his mistress, while Spooner makes some equally jarring sexual revelations. Then, Spooner makes an eloquent and persuasive case for his staying on as Hirst's personal secretary. As the curtain falls, it looks as if an edgy menage `a quatre has been formed.

In a play as static as this, the emphasis has to be on words, mood and states of being. The words are brilliantly deployed. The mood is autumnal. The states of being are growing old, needing companionship, the slithering instability of illusion and reality, the burden of the artist and the elusive tapes of memory. Yet Pinter's underlying concern seems to hover offstage, a case of the middle-age megrims which, at the age of 46, Pinter may well feel or have felt when he was writing No Man's Land. It is at that point that the first bayoneting intimations of mortality strike home. The middle-aged man also senses that his possibilities for change have been narrowed or foreclosed and that an icily unalterable routine lies ahead.

It so happens that Hirst, Spooner, Foster and Briggs are the names of renowned 19th and early 20th century cricket players. Whatever Pinter, an ardent cricket fan, may have intended by that, No Man 's Land is a hilarious mine field of gamesmanship. The English relish putting each other down socially, intellectually and psychologically, and some of them are formidably adept at it. Pinter does it to perfection.

Of course, he has two perfect actors for it in Gielgud and Richardson, and Director Peter Hall never misses a nuance or a climax. Whenever Gielgud and Richardson play together, the evening becomes memorable. It was so in David Storey's Home and it is so now. Flawless timing, intuitive ensemble work, a mastery of gesture from antic toe to arching eyebrow, and marvelously contrasting voices, Gielgud's rippling clarinet and Richardson's booming bass viol--they have it all. May some guardian angel of drama protect and preserve them in our midst.

T.E. Kalem

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