Play Reading in English – No Man’s Land by Harold Pinter (1975)

HK English Speaking Union
  • Mon 21-11-2016 7:15 PM - 2 h

Colette Artbar

Free admission

Synopsis

No Man’s Land is the re-run of a Pinter play that has proved a great success recently in Broadway and in the West End of London. It has been performed in repertory together with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which the two great contemporary actors, Patrick Steward and Ian McKellen play the roles of Didi and Gogo.
 
Here in Pinter’s London-set, mid-period play they play complementary and conflicting characters likewise. Stewart plays Hirst, an alcoholic upper-class literary figure who lives in a grand house presumed to be in Hampstead, with Foster and Briggs - respectively his  secretary and man servant (or apparent bodyguard), who may be lovers. Spooner, played in the recent production by McKellen, a "failed, down-at-heel poet" whom Hirst has "picked up in a Hampstead pub" and invited home for a drink, becomes Hirst's house guest for the night.
 
Claiming to be a fellow poet, through a contest of at least-partly fantastic reminiscences, he appears to have known Hirst at university and to have shared mutual male and female acquaintances and relationships. Hirst’s life is fantasy to a large degree, and Spooner plays along — pretending to be an old Oxford chum, someone who’s shared girlfriends with him, a fellow poet. As they become increasingly inebriated the conversation turns into a power game.
 
Then Hirst’s two servants, the bulky, menacing Briggs and the cocky Foster, destroy the rapport (even if false) of their two elders and seek to control and manipulate the situation. Although the two older men discuss possibly fictional or at least highly imaginary wives and girlfriends they claim to have known and remembered in a tone that veers between fantasy and pathetic ‘men’s talk’, no women actually change the suffocating dynamic, any more than than they do in Godot, of which Pinter’s play is a kind of mirror image.
 
Pinter, the Nobel prizewinner of 2005, not long before his death that same year, was a close friend and great admirer of Beckett. The four characters of the play are named after cricket players, Pinter having been known as an avid cricket fan and amateur player. This NT Live production will be coming to Hong Kong in the New Year, and is well worth seeing.
 
On the left hand side is an introductory clip from the National Theatre production.
 
Facilitator: Julian Quail
 

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