No Man's Land

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.

And with David Bradley as the crow-like attendant, a sort of straggle-haired Wurzel Gummidge of the pub poetry scene, and Michael Gambon as the aghast, haunted literato with a head full of secrets, Rupert Goold’s production for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, settling for a season in St Martin’s Lane, seems more than ever like a reminiscent re-run of Waiting for Godot, Hirst and Spooner trapped in their roles, and memories, in a cold limbo which is forever icy and forever silent.

There is a theory that Godot is about alcoholism, the tramps’ nicknames, in French, standing for stiff drinks. The moment Gambon staggers, lurches slightly for the cocktail cabinet in Giles Cadle’s curiously impersonal, slightly cheap looking lounge (John Bury’s original design was a monumental grey mausoleum), you know that we’re in the boozer’s nightmare scenario of amnesia and inexplicable terror.

The old boys have met in Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath – where the finical, snooping Spooner is a “betwixt twig peeper” – and come back for the late night session. Always the great electrifying moment, Gambon bursts forth in daylight in a pin-striped suit to greet his old friend and evoke pre-War golden days in Oxford and their shared enthusiasm for the same woman. We soon realise this is the dawn before the dark and the great Gambon (Richardson’s name for him) will decline once more to that state of stricken gravity floating on the heroic intake of the malt that wounds.

Bradley is equally superb as Spooner, cawing and craven, picking at his language, all revealed as he releases his tattered invitation to the poetry reading in Chalk Farm. The sinister henchmen are played by Nick Dunning and David Walliams. Dunning’s Briggs is a superbly malevolent jumped-up waiter, while Walliams’ Foster, technically stiff and insufficiently emphatic with his trailing phrases, nonetheless conveys his seedy past with a looming sneeriness. I love the play and the way it yields a different set of secrets on each viewing. Think of the setting, now, as a bizarre hospitality suite, the last hope saloon, the final round.

- Michael Coveney