No Man's Land (play) - Critical Reception and Interpretation

Critical Reception and Interpretation

In reviewing the London première, on 24 April 1975, Michael Billington, of The Guardian, observes that the play is "about precisely what its title suggests":

the sense of being caught in some mysterious limbo between life and death, between a world of brute reality and one of fluid uncertainty. ... the play is a masterly summation of all the themes that have long obsessed Pinter: the fallibility of memory, the co-existence in one man of brute strength and sensitivity, the ultimate unknowability of women, the notion that all human contact is a battle between who and whom. ... It is in no sense a dry, mannerist work but a living, theatrical experience full of rich comedy in which one speech constantly undercuts another.

Over a decade after having written The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber, 1996), the first edition of his authorised biography of Pinter, Billington discusses his critical perspective on the play in his videotaped discussion for Pinter at the BBC, broadcast on BBC Four television from 26 October through 9 November 2002." After admitting that No Man's Land is a "haunting weird play" that he himself "can never fully understand – Who can? – but it works on you", he reviews the genesis of the play's first line ("As it is?"), which came to Pinter in taxicab while riding home from dinner out alone, and the thematic significance of the titular metaphorical phrase no man's land, and finds "something of Pinter" in both of the main characters, each one a writer whom Pinter may have to some degree feared becoming: one "with all the trappings of success but is inured by fame, wealth, comfort" (Hirst); the other, "the struggling, marginal, the pin-striped writer" who "does not make it" (Spooner); though when Billington put his theory to Pinter, Pinter said (jokingly), "Well, yes, maybe; but I've never had two man servants named Foster and Briggs."

In reviewing Goold's revival of the play at the Duke of York's Theatre in 2008, Billington points out that "Hirst, a litterateur haunted by dreams and memories, is, as he tells Spooner, 'in the last lap of a race I had long forgotten to run'. But, while his servants conspire to lead Hirst to oblivion, Spooner attempts a chivalric rescue-act, dragging him towards the light of the living. The assumption is that his bid fails, as all four characters are finally marooned in a no-man's land 'which remains forever, icy and silent'."

In this play replete with echoes of T. S. Eliot, Spooner may appear to have failed in his apparent efforts to ingratiate himself with and perhaps even to "rescue" Hirst from "drowning" himself in drink. But Spooner still remains in the house at the end of the play, "in no man's land," along with Hirst (and Foster and Briggs), and the play ends in an impasse much like that of Pinter's 1960 play The Caretaker, to which critics compare No Man's Land.

As various other critics do, Michael Coveney is still asking: "Yes, but what does it all mean? Kenneth Tynan railed against the 'gratuitous obscurity' of Harold Pinter's poetic 1975 play when it was first produced by Peter Hall at the National starring John Gielgud as the supplicant versifier Spooner and Ralph Richardson as his host Hirst, patron and supporter of the arts. But the play is always gloriously enjoyable as an off-kilter vaudeville of friendship and dependency." In The Guardian, Billington concludes that "This is a compelling revival much aided by Neil Austin's lighting and Adam Cork's subliminal sound," observing: "when audience and cast finally joined in applauding Pinter, seated in a box, I felt it was in recognition of an eerily disturbing play that transports us into a world somewhere between reality and dream."

Both Billington and Paul Taylor (in The Independent) give the production 4 out of 5 stars, while Charles Spencer, reviewing the production in The Daily Telegraph, like other critics making inevitable comparisons with the original production, rates it as "equally fine, with Michael Gambon and David Bradley rising magnificently to the benchmark set by their illustrious predecessors," but points out that he too does not feel that he fully understands it: "Even after three decades I cannot claim fully to understand this haunting drama that proves by turns funny, scary, and resonantly poetic, but I have no doubt that it is one of the handful of indisputable modern classics that Pinter has written, and a piece that will haunt and tantalise the memory of all who see it."

In another feature on Goold's 2008 revival, following the responses of "three Pinter virgins" who did not understand or enjoy it ("Matilda Egere-Cooper, urban music journalist: 'Obscure and exhausting' "; "David Knott, political lobbyist: 'Don't expect to feel uplifted...' "; and "Susie Rushton, editor and columnist: 'Where's the joke?' "), the Independent's critic, Paul Taylor, reiterates his praise of No Man's Land, concluding:

Like many classic Pinter plays, "No Man's Land" is about the reaction to an intruder who threatens the status quo ante. The subtlety that gradually emerges in this play, though, is that Spooner, the seedy Prufrockian failed poet, is the alter ego of his host, the moneyed litterateur, Hirst, and that his predatory intrusion also represents an abortive attempt to reconnect Hirst to life and to his creativity and to save him from the bitter stalemate of old age. Mysterious, bleakly beautiful and very funny, "No Man's Land" demonstrates that though it may take a little while to latch on to the laws of Pinterland, it is well worth the effort.