Programme Cover
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Almeida Theatre Company Production, Almeida
Theatre, London, November 1992
Hirst - Harold Pinter
Spooner - Paul Eddington
Foster - Douglas Hodge
Briggs - Gawn Grainger
Directed by David Leveaux
Design - Bob Crowley
Lighting - Mark Henderson
Sound - John A Leonard
In the presence of greatness
by John Peter
Here is a portrait of the artist as an actor, a portrait of the
artist as an old hand. Actually, at 62, Harold Pinter does not look
old at all. He is appearing as an actor for the first time in Britain
in 22 years, playing Hirst in his own No Manís Land at the
Almeida; and he has that about him which you would fain call master:
authority. In theatre jargon this is called stage presence. It is
not something they teach at drama schools. It comes from a hard
inner confidence in what you are doing, a natural, instinctive understanding
of the role you are playing, and a subconscious assumption that
when you are on stage, your presence on it will alter its map, its
psychological shape. With this razor-sharp, violently restrained
production, by David Leveaux, you are literally in the presence
of greatness.
Pinter the actor rules the stage like a moody
emperor. He is playing a grand, smug, suave and deeply unpleasant
man of letters whose sturdy armchair is a throne to which supplicants
are brought for homage and humiliation. Hirst is both a crusty Lear
who demands faithful devotion, and a crippled Prospero whose magic
is fading. Under the hard veneer of confidence you sense the ripples
of panic. Hirst sits rock-like, but you can almost hear the slow
creaks of his inner fissures.Pinter seems almost to have altered
the bone structure of his face. The thrust of the massive jaw suggests
pugnacity, but his tight, flat upper lip has a hint of apprehensive
old age, and the look of his eyes, both searching and furtive, speaks
of insecurity. Alcohol is Hirstís main support. There are few books
in sight. When on his feet, he has the typical stiff-legged gait
of the upper-class clubman. It can suggest both evasiveness and
truculence, as well as a peculiarly English impression of walking
masterfully on the deck of a ship in choppy waters. When Ralph Richardson
played the part 17 years ago, he portrayed Hirst on the brink of
a majestic catatonia: a crumbling statue. Pinterís playing is more
up-front and aggressive, never far from belligerence.
This is important because, like all his plays, No Manís Land
is a battle for self-preservation. All Pinterís plots are strategies
of survival through defence. Someone appears who could be, and unusually
is, both aggressor and refugee: a spiritual interloper who could
upset the simple compromises of your life. To understand the new
arrival is to neutralise him. To be understood by him is to be defeated.
Spooner, too whom Hirst has brought home, with a mixture of curiosity
and disgust, is both guest and invader, like Davies, the tramp in
the Caretaker, or Anna in Old Times: he will have to be either subdued
or ejected. He is shabby, wary, and regally ingratiating. Paul Eddington
presents him with pitiless psychological accuracy as a born supplicant
nourished by frustration. I am disappointed, therefore I am. Spooner
is proud of his humility. He is a sexless and bedraggled fugitive
of the emotions, whose thin, downturned lips seem to invite the
inevitable rejection. Hirst is a figure of defensive aggression;
Spooner, of aggressive defence.
Harold Pinter with the cast |
The play moves on two levels. Like everything by
Pinter, it is about insecurity. Spooner is a poet and translator,
none too successful, who seeks the protection of the grand and successful
Hirst. Hirst has two servants: Foster (Douglas Hodge), flashy and
wolfish, a joker, a buccaneer; and Briggs (Gawn Grainger), whippet-like,
yet stolid and threatening. Will Spooner be an enemy or an ally?
Will they gain greater security with Hirst by a show of defiance?
This is a tense and complex conflict, and like all conflicts between
Englishmen which cut across the boundaries of class and dependence,
it ripples with resentments and unspoken, almost decorous, menace.
But this does not quite explain the almost hallucinatory effect
of the play. No, it is haunting because it speaks of, and speaks
to, the unconscious. Spooner is not only a down-at-heel poet: he
is also Hirstís alter ego, his conscience, his nagging reminder,
the painful debit on his spiritual balance sheet. This is why each
man keeps recognising features of his life in the other. Hirst is
the king of the mind, arrogant but crumbling; Spooner is the exile
of the mind, anxious but tenacious. No Manís Land is an anatomy
of the creative life ion which smug success is forever haunted by
shabby failure, the public posture by the private anguish. In the
same way, the confident tycoon or the star politician might sense
the unwelcome presence of another, hidden self, more pushy, more
humble, both bruised and nourished by rejection.
I have met people who said that they had been totally gripped by
this play, but had no idea what it meant. This is usually a sign
that the play speaks of something you do not want, or do not dare,
to know. In No Manís Land, Pinter has written the great unending
drama of self-doubt and self-loathing. The tetchy resentments and
territorial aggressions of his earlier plays here becomes a war
of a manís inner selves, an account of endless private accountability.
What did I once promise myself? What else could I have become? Which
of these two selves is my real self? In such a conflict, time is
irrelevant. ëIs it,í Hirst asks, ëthe night before last?í It could
be any night, or all nights. You are forever eyeball to eyeball
with what you might have been, or what you would have liked to be.
This is why the ending of the play is both frozen and potentially
explosive. The two elderly men are both prisoners and fugitives,
hoping to remain and afraid to go. Is this all there is to quests,
ambition and fulfilment? Is this all the comfort that failure can
hope for? There is something fearless in drawing up an ordnance
survey map of no manís land with such unsparing precision. That
is why, and not because of its brutally brilliant humour, the play,
which could easily sound bleak, is actually bracing: a moral act
rather than an amoral acquiescence. Pinterís presence on the stage
lends it a sense of grand, rugged authenticity. Like Beckett, he
is too proud for the farce of giving and receiving; but he has been
to no manís land. If you ever find yourself there, you will not
feel so alone
.The Sunday Times, 8th November 1992
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