A critic's challenge: write a review of a Harold Pinter play without using the word 'menace'.
Well I guess I've already failed. Though really menace as a buzzword hardly does justice to Pinter's dramatic talents. Focusing on such shibboleths as 'menace' or 'power' can encourage one to either take Pinter's dramas as raw and contextless exercises in theatrical aggression, or devalue the richness of his theatrical poetry. Of course, as has been said before, there is a difference between poetry IN the theatre, and poetry OF the theatre: if T.S. Eliot and W.B Yeats's verse dramas are in the former category, Pinter certainly belongs in the latter. His cadences have all the verve of Stoppard and all the lyricism of Jose Rivera. No Man's Land it could be argued is the ur-Pinter text: with its eloquent digressions and delightful foulness and intense though pleasurable confusion, it may in fact be the Pinteriest of all Pinter plays.
So the fact that Steppenwolf Theatre's production of the cryptic text succeeds is a relief: it makes the play's strengths all the more notable, and the rewards all the more fun and also funny. The play appears to tell the story of Hirst (Jeff Perry) and Spooner (Mark David Kaplan, at the performances I saw) stumbling home to Hirst's stately London mansion after a chance encounter in a bar, and talking circles around various subjects, possibly on their way to a one-night stand. Hirst is an august man of letters, apparently a British national treasure, and Spooner is a down-at-heel gutter-snipe with unfulfilled poetic aspirations, of whom we get the sense his failures have somehow occurred in inverse proportion to Hirst's successes. The scene then shifts as Hirst's two manservants, the bullish Briggs (Jon Hudson Odom) and the boyish playboy Foster (Samuel Roukin) enter the scene and put their hooks into Hirst as it becomes possible Spooner may believe the great poet needs a rescue.
Even describing the plot of No Man's Land requires a certain amount of editorializing, as in terms of sheer narrative, it's likely the most elliptical drama Pinter wrote. That being said, experiencing No Man's Land is anything but daunting: the play's universe creates its own self-justifying reason for existence due to the sheer joy of being alive in its linguistic adventures and spending time with its world's inhabitants. Part of the major fun of any Pinter play is NOT knowing exactly what's going on: he manages to make an enjoyable experience out of head-scratching. You wouldn't accept obvious answers even if they were offered.
While not possessing the same innate impressiveness as Sir Ralph Richardson (the original Hirst), Jeff Perry finds a far more neurotically interior and energetic man behind the opaque facade, and works overtime to never let his character's thoughts and feelings disappear into the haze of an alcoholic stupor (all four characters in the play drink enough to make your uncle blush). His Hirst is more weirdo than Godhead, and there's nothing wrong with that: it's fascinating to watch him move about the downstairs Steppenwolf stage with a physicality more lycanthrope than Byzantine. Kaplan expresses Spooner's mellifluous meddling with a voice that's a great fit for the language, and his final speech to Hirst surprises in its tenderness (though could go further with its embarrassing auto-servility). Odom acquits himself just fine as Briggs, and Roukin brings real surprising feeling and innocence to a role that could be dismissed as too-cool-for-school; his Foster has genuine sentiment which adds a welcome color to the drama's tapestry. Director Les Waters stages the play without too many frills, though a few technical elements, such as the act-ending sound cues, and second-half lighting looks, could have stood to be less abrasively stylized.
I first discovered No Man's Land in March of 2020, and watching and rewatching the 1978 filmed-for-television version with the play's original cast has become a common and constant component in my life ever since. Remembering a time before I knew the world of No Man's Land materializes as tough and disbelievable. My relationship to living within the room of this play feels incredibly personal, so much so that I worry I can't communicate such a singular experience in written-form. No Man's Land guided me through quarantine, and now lives deep in my bloodstream. So I could leave it at the fact that the production at Steppenwolf is really quite good, and Waters and cast mine the beats as intelligently as one could ask. But really, this play deals with ultimate things. The scholar Owen Barfield said that he was personally guilty of believing that Shakespeare's thoughts were his own feelings: and really, how often have any of us put on a song for someone and uttered some variant of "this song just so perfectly expresses how I feel," when, in reality, if that song is the best encapsulation of our feelings, it is not enough to say the song EXPRESSES how we feel, it IS how we feel. I feel the same as Barfield when I hear Hirst say late in Act II that "There are places in my heart...where no living soul...has...or can ever...trespass." And yet unlike with Shakespearean interpretation, where eloquence and feeling go hand-in-hand, Pinter gives you the feeling and leaves the meaning to what Spooner calls "psychological interpreters, the wetdream world."
Just know that regardless of such a weakly expressed recommendation, this play has secrets for those who listen. Enter its world at your own peril.
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