terra incognita
“In my day, nobody changed • man was.” The line is less a summing up of No Man’s Land than a gesture to the futility of such endeavours. Two aging writers torment and tantalise each other with stories of their pasts - none, part or all of which might be true - casting out memories to each other like bait on a fi sh-hook. Truth has little relevance in their game of psychological hide-and-seek • more important, as always for Pinter, is power.
Oscar Wood is well cast as Spooner the struggling poet, nervous to prove himself amid the fi ne wine and servants of his more successful counterpart. His monologues twitch with insecurity, cramming more and more words into each breath, only for them to bounce off his host with little effect. Ewan Roxburgh has less to play with as Hirst, but he carries the role with restraint and confi dence, lord of his Hampstead manor.
His pseudo-aristocratic nonchalance takes a sinister turn in the second act, however, when Hirst enters his lounge the following morning with no recollection of the previous night. Spooner hopes to leech off his old friend’s wealth, but Hirst seems to mistake him for ‘Charles’, a friend from his youth whose reality we are never sure of. Spooner plays along, re-inventing himself as an aggrieved husband cuckolded by Hirst, indulging the old man’s fantasies of a wild, rakish youth.
This is, perhaps, the highlight of Wood’s performance, forcing his imitation bile through carefully gritted teeth, his fury at once clearly calculated and, yet, oddly persuasive. The tale of adultery may be fabricated, but the emotions fuelling his pretence are painfully genuine. Canny set design emphasises the distance between the two men, positioning their chairs on opposite ends of the stage so that a gulf of empty space yawns open whenever they sit down.
Two other characters, Foster and Briggs, loom in the background, their function never entirely clear, seeming to oscillate between servants and gangsters, both obeying the writers and intimidating them. The cast lapses into mannered physicality at times, nodding or gesticulating to give their bodies something to do rather than to visualise the evasions and double-blinds of which their dialogues consist.
This is, nevertheless, only an occasional problem and may even add to the elusivenss of their roles. Pinter disturbs by frustrating our urge to interpret, to rationalise what we don’t understand, seeking the design and meaning in art that we cannot achieve in life. The characters’ inner ‘psychologies’ remain as ineffable and inscrutable as our own, the self jarred out of certainty by the constant struggle for power and public image.
The silences, the obfuscations, the looming menace of the cannot-be-said, are all too familiar.
2nd Mar 2006