Harold Pinter’s ‘No Man’s Land’ @ Undermain Theatre
Photos by Paul Semrad and Rob Menzel
—Martha Heimberg
Undermain Theatre continues their 40th season with the regional premiere of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, a late modernist classic written in 1974 by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. And what a tough and classy slice of live theater it is.
Directed by Ivan Klousia with easy wit and tightening tension, the production is an evocative evening of thrilling theater composed of compelling dialogue, playful puns, menacing sequences, brutal humor—and a quartet of flesh-and-ego characters so bizarre and fascinating you can’t wait to see what they’ll do next. In fact, “What will they do at all?” is the question at the existential heart of this hilarious and terrifyingly open-ended two-act play.
The plot is simple enough. Two aging men have been drinking in a nearby pub, and have moved on for more of the same at a wealthy home somewhere in London. Set designer Robert Winn opens up the intimate basement theater’s stage area to its full width, creating a sense of columned elegance, enhanced by Steve Woods time-telling lighting design, and Paul Semrad’s eerie, jazzy sound design. If clothes make the man, costume designer Katelyn Jackson lets us see at a glance who’s wearing the tailored trousers and who’s wearing a bedraggled overcoat.
Hirst, played by Undermain Producing Artistic Director Bruce Dubose, begins the show in old-boy terse mode. He’s the rich owner of the house, a hard drinker who needs even a stranger’s company as much as he craves vodka. The guest says his name is Spooner; he’s played by a deliciously comic and pitifully ingratiating Tyrees Allen in a masterful Undermain debut. Sooner seems never to have met his host before that night.
As Hirst gets staggeringly drunk, Spooner starts telling wonderfully entertaining stories about his brilliant friends and his adventures as a poet and world traveler. Despite his grubby clothes, Sooner has a posh accent, and talks a good game about teaching aspiring poets. “I am the poet; I am eternally present and active,” he declaims, suddenly heroic. Allen’s Sooner knows how to play to any house. He’s the suffering poet one moment, and a punning jokester the next. He tells Hirst that his great strength as a poet is that he has never been loved, even by his mother. Then he makes a crude pun about how his horrid old mum still has great buns. Croissant, of course. The gleam of the conman flashes in his eye when he offers to be the addled rich man’s friend, yet he evokes deep pathos too, his body crumpled in on itself and (in a late scene) hands pressed together as he begs Hirst for a job.
Hirst turns out to be a famous man of letters, in a time when such writers were celebrated in England like the rock stars of today. At first, Dubose’s Hirst appears to be simply an addled drunk, staggering to refill his vodka glass. But when he stares dead-eyed into the distance and describes the no man’s land of the title as a place that “does not move or change,” a rising despair fills the stage. We feel, full-on, the dark hollowness Pinter’s words can evoke when spoken by an actor of presence and certainty. When the mighty fall in this play, you can literally feel the reverberation in your seat.
Hirst’s two hired men show up, and the play takes a gritty, sinister tone in the second act. Max Morgan’s Foster is a jaunty pretty boy with a working-class accent and a mocking smile, except when he crosses his arms like a sentry and stares at Sooner. All his chatty charm about being “your new best friend” vanishes with his threatening posture. Marcus Stimac’s Briggs is the muscled Irish tough, hilarious in his telling of how he gave detailed and disastrous directions to Foster when they first met. We’re laughing, but it’s closer to a nervous titter. There’s nothing funny about Briggs’ intimidation of Sooner; he’s scary even when he gruffly offers scrambled eggs and champagne to a guest (who realizes he may have few choices left). Are these men Hirst’s butler and secretary? His bodyguards? Who has the keys to the locked doors, anyway? Pinter is funny, but not funny ha-ha.
In the second act, when Hirst walks in freshly turned out in a new coat—and suddenly begins talking to Sooner as an old school chum from Cambridge—we feel the true weirdness of the play. Sooner responds like the improv champ he is, adding to Hirst’s scattered memories about village life and favorite professors. Is he making it all up or not? If these two were ever friends, their ugly exchange recounting the times they betrayed and cuckolded each other would end any such notion.
Are any of these people who they say they are? Maybe. But maybe it doesn’t matter in Pinter’s famously ambiguous play, where we’re not even sure where they are. Perhaps Hirst’s no man’s land, “where nothing ever happens forever,” is the sad space occupied by two exhausted old men stuck in a world where they see no future.
One unambiguous item: In the company’s fourth decade, Undermain Theatre still delivers the provocative, exciting classic theater experience that has won them national and international recognition.
WHEN: November 9-December 3
WHERE: 3200 Main Street (Deep Ellum), Dallas
WEB: undermain.org
