If you haven’t got enough of Harold Pinter with the current productions of The Homecoming at the Almeida and The Lover / The Collection at the Comedy, don’t worry: you may soon get a chance for another Pinter fix and it’s a good one. The playwright’s 1975 play No Man’s Land is tipped for a West End run, with a cast including Michael Gambon.
No Man’s Land concerns a wealthy Hampstead aesthete, Hirst, who meets a shabby and penniless poet, Spooner, and invites him into his elite circle. Since its premiere at the National, its major London revivals 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.
Gambon’s previous Pinter credits include The Caretaker, directed by Patrick Marber in the West End in 2000, and the 2005 all-star rehearsed reading of Celebration, commemorating the playwright’s 75th birthday and Nobel Prize win. Gambon’s last West End appearance was in the wordless, 30-minute Samuel Beckett playlet Eh Joe in 2006.
No Man’s Land will be directed by Rupert Goold, much lauded and laureled for his Broadway-bound Patrick Stewart Macbeth, and will open first in August at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The cast is also expected to include David Bradley.