Gandalf and Professor-X in the West End : Review of No Man’s Land

Matinee performance December 2016, Wyndham Theatre, London.

Playwright: Harold “Noble Prize” Pinter

Cast: Ian “Gandalf” McKellen as Spooner; Patrick “Professor-X” Stewart as Hirst; Ownen “Game of Thrones” Teale as Briggs; Damien “new guy” Molony as Foster

“No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent.”

After decades of acclaim and collaboration on the Hollywood set and the West End stage, McKellen and Stewart are reunited once more. This time they team up to interpret Harold Pinter’s nonsensical yet deeply thought provoking No Man’s Land. Written almost a half century ago, the play’s themes are as relevant as ever.

Lubricated by grand quantities of Vodka and Scotch, the two central characters of Spooner (McKellen) and Hirst (Stewart) talk to, or rather at each other about various seemingly confusing and unrelated subjects, delighting the audience with deadpan humour and ghastly insults. All the while the two stumble convincingly as they speak, surely someone back stage had switched the prop drinks with real alcoholic ones?

To begin, the setting of a Hampstead living room is interestingly dull. Across two acts it does not change. This in itself references one’s feeling of being in limbo, of being stuck in no man’s land.

While act I easily confuses a first time audience and delivers moments of laughter provided by the author’s exceptional command of words, its most important role is laying a foundation for the subtleties and refrains of the second act.

After the interval the themes of the play begin to emerge, and No Man’s Land becomes just a little bit less confusing. Hirst’s photo album is one such theme. In the first act Hirst mentions this photo album and insists to himself in a drunken monologue that his friends from the past were real, but at the same time forever remains a memory. In the second act the purpose of the album becomes clear. When Spooner presses Hirst to show him the album, Hirst listens but does not reply. Indeed, he later tells us that he no longer wishes the faces in the album to be named. It is as if Hirst lives in self imposed loneliness, comparing himself to tennis balls left behind by children under trees, moldy and blackened with time.

Harold Pinter never meant the play to be easily understood, or to form any linear storyline at all. Instead, we the audience are free to interpret it for ourselves, or simply to revel in Pinter’s beautiful use of the English language.

Pssssst…there are still a few tickets left!

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