Michael Gambon & David Bradley
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Review Round-up: Great Gambon Lands Critical Hit

Rupert Goold’s production of Harold Pinter’s No Man's Land opened in the West End last night (7 October 2008, previews from 27 September) to an audience including the playwright himself as well as a plethora of celebrity guests (See Also Today’s 1st Night Photos and WOS TV).

The four-hander stars veteran thespians Michael Gambon, David Bradley, Nick Dunning and, making his stage acting debut, Little Britain star David Walliams. Hirst (Gambon), a wealthy Hampstead aesthete meets a shabby and penniless poet, Spooner (Bradley), and invites him home for a late-night session of drinking and games, overseen by his henchmen, Briggs (Dunning) and Foster (Walliams).

No Man's Land premiered in 1975 at the National Theatre where the cast included John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Its major London revivals since have included a 1992 Almeida production, which starred Pinter and transferred to the West End, and a 2001 production, directed by Pinter and starring Corin Redgrave and John Wood, back at the NT.

The “great Gambon” stole many of the plaudits in today’s newspapers, his “magnificent” and “compelling” portrayal of Hirst matched only by the “equally superb” work of David Bradley as Spooner. David Walliams didn’t fair quite so well, with some labelling him “technically stiff” and slightly “overwhelmed” by his first straight stage role. Overall, though, Rupert ‘midas-touch’ Goold appears to have done it again – with raves for his “metaphysical” take on No Man's Land following the recent ebullient reception of his other current West End offering, Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Simon Edge in the Daily Express (three stars) – “Gambon himself is magnificent. Glued into his armchair by booze, he peers bewildered at the guest he cannot remember inviting to join him, and the slightest widening of an eyelid seems like a dramatic event. For his part, Bradley looks wonderfully seedy, like a telegraph pole with wrinkles … But his rambling garrulousness is not as compelling as it could be, and you can forgive Gambon for drifting off … Nick Dunning’s rent-a-menace, as the senior butler Briggs, seems to fall into the category of Pinter-by-numbers. Meanwhile David Walliams … seems overwhelmed in his role as the younger houseman Foster. We know from Little Britain that he can be a seriously good actor, but here the need to be Pinteresque seems to have made him forget everything he knows about holding an audience … As a director, Goold thrives when he can turn an established script on its head and inside out. He seems less confident with the kind of work which – on Pinter’s terrifying say-so – there is no messing with.”

- by Theo Bosanquet

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	No Man's Land - 8th Oct 2008 reviews