THOSE who have seen the honed perfection of the first three offerings in the Gate's Pinter Festival will wish to confirm for themselves - or, of course, not - my submission that the fourth, No Man's Land, is the best. My reasons include the facts that it is most recently and powerfully in my memory; that there is more of it to savour, with a running time of some 2 hours 15 minutes, while the others were under an hour; and that it touches at least as many nerves as its predecessors.
It opens with two men in an elegant drawing room. The owner, Hirst, is quietly drunk, and drinking; his guest, Spooner, is a slightly shabby acquisition found in a nearby pub, loquacious in a way that suggests he is singing for his supper. He is learned and self-revealing, a man who knows that he has never been loved and that his strength lies in people's indifference to him. Hirst is weightily terse, in some psychological trouble.
As Hirst crawls out to his bed, two other men, Foster and Briggs, enter. They clearly find the presence of a stranger like Spooner a familiar phenomenon, and are contemptuous of him, and threatening; when they leave him, he finds that he is locked in the room for the night. A born victim, he knows that the shark is in the harbour. But morning reveals the duo as servants-cum-minders, and Briggs, the tougher and older, serves him a breakfast with iced champagne, damask and silver - but with contempt.
Hirst reappears, dapper and vigorous, to resume their conversation, which takes an extraordinary twist. Did they once know each other as young men; did Hirst seduce, as he maintains at vicious length, Spooner's wife; is Spooner able to retaliate with details of Hirst's social sins? Or is it all a surreal game, the one attacking, the other defending? The strange, presumptuous servants return, Spooner makes a bid to join their entourage and is defeated; it all ends in enigma.
The extraordinary, open-ended text is given its full due in the acting, in Ben Barnes's precise direction and in a splendid set by Frank Hallinan Flood. T.P. McKenna is Hirst, exuding the power of the rich and famous; Nick Dunning's Foster is a blend of youth and thuggishness; Tony Haygarth's Briggs has an almost criminal assurance; and Niall Buggy's Spooner is an astonishing creation of a complex, erudite victim. Together they are fascinating, an ensemble to remember in a play that haunts the mind.
