ARTicles vol. 5 i.4c: Pinter Land

What does it mean to describe a play as “Pinteresque?” Harold Pinter’s name has inspired an adjective in the dictionary that specifies the mood his plays invoke: ambiguity. Pinter’s characters live in a world of intimacy and isolation. They speak in epic arias and pregnant pauses. Their dramas unfold in familiar domestic settings that become strange battlefields. In No Man’s Land, an ageing writer named Hirst has entombed himself in a household managed by two impertinent young servants. He brings home Spooner, a down-at-heel poet he encountered in a pub. The two writers embark on a drunken spree that veers between farce and bitter nihilism. Each moment is unpredictable, yet recognizably Pinter.

The 1976 premiere of No Man’s Land starred Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. Critics lauded the performances but fumbled trying to say what the play was about. Both Knights of the British Empire, the 74-year-old Richardson and 72-year-old Gielgud embodied the best English acting. Reviews of their performances describe the sound of their contrasting voices as a symphony; their subtle gestures created comedy and pathos in the pauses between the lines. Their portrayals of Hirst and Spooner riveted audiences, yet no one could say exactly what these characters were doing. Martin Esslin summed up the reviews of No Man’s Land in one line: “Magnificent parts giving rise to unforgettable performances by two of the greatest actors of our time – but what is Pinter saying?”

In a program note, Harold Clurman speculated that the two writers represented dueling sides of Pinter’s own persona, alternately sabotaging and helping one another. Clurman later confessed that: “On reading my Kennedy Center piece, the two actors who play the central characters (John Gielgud as the ‘loser,’ Ralph Richardson as the ‘winner’) both declared me mistaken. … But when interviewed they confessed, tongue-in-cheek no doubt, that they weren’t at all sure what the play was supposed to mean. In this they follow the author’s own tack: a refusal to say anything that can be readily formulated.”

Each review of the original production struggles to pin down the facts about the men’s relationship and the meaning of their actions. In Time, Lawrence Malkin described the scenario as “a reality so ephemeral that it may be false, and often is.” In The New Yorker, Brendan Gill likened Pinter to a slight-of-hand magician, saying that he “lacerate[s] and enchant[s] us by giving us a choice between believing that [he has] told us everything and believing that [he has] told us nothing.” In Newsweek, Jack Kroll insisted that “it’s the play of possible meanings around the shocking clarity of the dramatic situation that gives the drama its kick. Pinter’s stripped down style isn’t concealing emptiness, it’s controlling the tremendous pressure of a multiplicity of meanings, of possibilities. Like Picasso, he shows us we have more than one face.”

In this haze of ambiguity, how did Kroll discern a “shocking clarity of the dramatic situation?” Although critics struggled with the play’s themes, they all instantly recognized the play’s “Pinteresque” setting. They used the same words to describe Hirst’s “luxurious” yet “ominous” home. Kroll called it “that famous domesticated Colosseum, the Pinter room.” Pinter creates both teacup and tempest by using two trademark tools: a domestic space that offers more isolation than security, and language that obscures more than it reveals. When Hirst and Spooner first speak onstage, we find ourselves simultaneously on familiar ground and disoriented.

As in many Pinter plays, information equals power. Spooner has been entertaining Hirst with stories at a pub before arriving at the house, but he puts off telling the wealthier man his name until claiming a comfortable seat in his home. The writers use conversation to parry and thrust, not to communicate. Spooner tells long-winded anecdotes that often conclude with questions about Hirst’s life. Hirst, however, drunk and determined to get drunker, replies with absurd non-sequitors or clownish double-takes.

Even the play’s title plays a linguistic trick: men alone occupy Hirst’s world; this is a land without women. Who are these four men, and why have they come together in a twisted family that disdains love? The wandering Spooner boasts that he derives “strength” and “security” from the fact that he has “never been loved.” He observes human relations from afar. But, he insists, “I don’t peep on sex. That’s gone forever. You follow me? … And when you can’t keep proper distance between yourself and others … the game’s not worth the candle.” This implies that the hope for love has passed for these men. But when Spooner formally introduces himself – thirteen pages into the men’s conversation – he recalls a wife. Spooner describes a country cottage where this wife served tea on the lawn. He gives no explanation to reconcile his prior claim of a loveless life but he strikes a chord in Hirst. The wealthy man toasts the tramp.

Hirst immediately compares himself to Spooner, claiming that he too shared a cottage with a hostess who served tea on the lawn. But when Spooner encourages him to reveal more, Hirst makes a chilling implication about marriage: “In the village church, the beams are hung with garlands, in honour of young women of the parish, reputed to have died virgin.” Hirst pauses, and then adds: “However, the garlands are not bestowed on maidens only, but on all who die unmarried, wearing the white flower of a blameless life.” What’s the blame in marriage? Like Spooner, Hirst refuses to explain what soured his memory of love. Spooner presses Hirst: he refers to his own wife’s legs, which Hirst guesses “carried her away” from Spooner. “Carried who away? Yours or mine?” Spooner responds.

The conversation spirals away from concrete facts the moment they begin to emerge. Like many of Pinter’s characters, Spooner and Hirst respond to questions and accusations with more questions. Often they confuse the subject of the previous statement, as when Hirst answers a question about his wife with the question, “What wife?” It seems too painful for these men to speak about their women. Their ambivalence about past homes bonds the two older men. But the new home in which they find themselves offers little relief.

After the drunken Hirst slinks off to bed, his servants burst in on Spooner. The young Briggs and Foster are arrogant housekeepers who ignore their master’s desperate state in a parody of domesticity. Briggs and Foster speak in crisp, confident statements. When Spooner hesitates to answer Foster’s questions, Foster answers them himself: “What are you drinking? Christ I’m thirsty. How are you? I’m parched.” The servant signals his higher status over the visitor by not pausing for cues of any kind.

Instead, Briggs supplies information about Spooner himself. He recognizes the older man as a busboy at a pub. Spooner tries to recover from this humiliating fact by claiming he works as a favor to the pub’s landlord, who is a friend. Foster promptly contradicts him by saying he’s known the pub’s landlord himself for years. Briggs’ and Foster’s rapid-fire barrage of questions and answers ridicules Spooner’s evasiveness until he delivers a long monologue about his past.

Spooner regains his confidence through his uninterrupted speech, and invites the younger men to his house in the country. Again, he overlooks an inconsistency in his stories: he previously implied to Hirst that he no longer visits the cottage and family. However, he implies the opposite to Briggs and Foster, telling the younger men that they would receive warm welcomes from his wife and daughters. The only reference the servants have made to women so far was to brag about Foster’s easy way with them. Foster asks if Spooner’s daughters would love him “at first sight.” “Quite possibly, “ Spooner laughs, calling them “remarkably gracious women.”

If Spooner has “never been loved,” what does it mean that they would “love” Foster at first sight? The carelessness with which he offers his daughters to the young servant reveals deep cynicism and hostility toward his family. Does he consider their love worthless? The exchange suggests many degrees of misogyny, but no specific source.

Thus, Spooner and Hirst reveal vivid impressions of their past. We learn that both writers’ previous domestic spaces — although shared with gracious women – have become bitter memories. Wives and daughters have proven inconstant, and the older men find more security in the cruelty of other men than in familial love. No Man’s Land introduces us to four men who exist in a world where love recedes as a painful memory and home becomes a refuge from family instead of its center.

The play’s ambiguity leaves room for electric performances. Catharine Hughes – one of the few female critics to weigh in on the play’s premiere – gives us perhaps the best advice for interpreting it: “It is a mistake to speculate excessively on what Pinter ‘means.’ His plays, like those of all major playwrights, from the Greeks through Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett, are at their most effective as experiences – adventures for the mind, but not intellectual exercises. No Man’s Land is, I suspect, Pinter at his most entertaining, his most darkly humorous.”

Miriam Weisfeld is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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