In 2009 the same team – director Sean
Mathias and acting knights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart – were
responsible for an almost universally lauded
Waiting For Godot in the West End.
It later transferred to Broadway, in repertoire with Harold Pinter’s
No Man’s Land (1975); now, the
latter production has travelled back across the Atlantic, and berths in
London after a UK tour.
I was one of the few dissidents regarding
Godot, and in particular regarding
Stewart. Here, however, I have no such reservations. As Hirst, a
successful man of letters, he exudes the kind of restraint which
implies immense power in reserve, yet is also when occasion demands
vain, rumbling or even elegiac, evoking at various moments
Shakespeare’s Lear and Beckett’s Krapp. He meshes beautifully with
McKellen as Spooner, his down-at-heel guest. This Spooner, with his CND
lapel badge and rudimentary tuft of a silver ponytail, is ruefully,
chucklingly aware of his straitened circumstances. The pair insert a
number of discreet grace notes: when Spooner reminisces of a third
party, “How bald he was!”, McKellen casts a sidelong glance at Stewart,
and at what after St Paul’s is the most famous dome currently in
London. They graduate the increasing sozzlement of the first act
finely, and slip with equal assurance into what seem to be both the
same and entirely different characters the morning after.
As Hirst’s minions, Owen Teale growls and looms most Pinteresquely as
Briggs (this is, after all, the man who killed Jon Snow in
Game Of Thrones), and if Damien
Molony’s Foster is superficially cheerier, he can also twirl a
coffee-maker’s power cable like a thuggish Roger Daltrey. Stephen
Brimson Lewis’s formal yet alienating set is surmounted by a
forestscape, as if to suggest a wilderness similar to that of the title
in which each man finds himself.
I was still a child when the première production of
No Man’s Land with Ralph Richardson
and John Gielgud transferred to this theatre from the National in 1975;
I do, however, remember Pinter himself appearing as Hirst opposite Paul
Eddington in 1992-3. That production was, I averred, “One to tell your
grandchildren about”; this one fits comfortably into the same sentence.
Written for the Financial
Times.