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Man's Land (2001)
Royal National Theatre, London |
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| Programme Cover |
Directed by Harold Pinter
Set Design by Eileen Diss
Costume Design by Dany Everett
Lighting Design by Mick Hughes
Sound Design by Gregory ClarkCast:
Corin Redgrave as Hirst
John Wood as Spooner
Danny Dyer as Foster
Andy de la Tour as Briggs
The Guardian Saturday December 8, 2001
Pinter's victims of the past
This is a haunted as well as a haunting play. For those of a certain
generation, it is stalked by memories of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson
in the original 1975 production. But the brilliant thing about Harold
Pinter's revival of his own play at the Lyttleton is that, without
banishing the ghosts, it forces us to re-examine what the work is
actually about. Pinter's production clearly presents us with a collision
between two different forms of desperation. Hirst, the wealthy, immured
writer within whose austerely luxurious drawing
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John
Wood, Corin Redgrave, Danny Dyer & Andy de la Tour
Photographer: Ivan Kyncl |
room the action takes place, is trapped in the present
and plagued by inconsolable memories of the past. The tragedy of Spooner,
the ageing Chalk Farm pub-worker who seeks to rescue him, is that
he has no definable past, just a series of self-invented myths. Either
way, Pinter implies, we are the victims of our own memories. But the
play is a poem, not a thesis. And the great thing about it is the
way it is defined by its performers - here Corin Redgrave and John
Wood prove an astonishing atch for past interpreters. Redgrave's Hirst
catches the contrast between the legless night-drinker and spruce
morning-after figure, just as Pinter did in the 1992 Almeida revival.
But Redgrave's performance is also remarkable for the intensity of
both his rage and compassion. In his cups, Redgrave becomes a frighteningly
demonic figure, trying to lay to rest the ghosts of his remembrance;
later he lends a grave and quiet beauty to the speech in which Hirst
urges Spooner: "Tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered."
If Redgrave's Hirst is forever haunted by the past, Wood's amazing
Spooner is constantly seeking to create one. Far more clearly than
Gielgud, Wood shows us that
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John
Wood & Corin Redgrave
Photographer: Ivan Kyncl |
Spooner is a superfluous man trying to find his mission
in life, and to that end he creates a series of elaborate fantasies.
One of them is that he is a poet - when Wood describes golden versifying
evenings at his country house, his eyes glaze mistily over. A born
fantasist, Wood also enters into other people's dreams. There's a
great moment when he stares in astonishment at Hirst's description
of their Oxford past, before entering enthusiastically into the game.
But Wood also beautifully suggests something quixotically chivalric
about Spooner's attempt to rescue Hirst from a doomed stasis. This
is a rich evening in which Pinter memorably shows how the past, in
theatre as in life, is fixed and fluid at the same time. |
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