CULTURE SHOCK:The Gate production of Pinter's 'No Man's Land' offers as great an exhibition of the actor's art as you are likely to see here
AS LONG AGO AS 1960, in a programme note for his play The Caretaker,Harold Pinter wrote that "Given a man in a room, he will sooner or later receive a visitor . . . There is no guarantee, however, that he will possess a visiting card, with detailed information as to his last place of residence, last job, next job, number of dependents etc . . . A character on the stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things."
With one qualification, this is an accurate description, not just of The Caretaker, but of all Pinter's plays. The qualification is that not only is there no guarantee that the visitor will possess a visiting card to explain who he is, but there is every guarantee that he won't.
To get a sense of how good Rupert Goold's production of Pinter's No Man's Landat the Gate is, and in particular of the overwhelming force of David Bradley and Michael Gambon in the central roles, you have to understand how much this "Pinteresque" mode goes against the grain of 20th century acting. Since the Second World War, almost every trained actor has learned the principles of Constantin Stanislavski and in particular the notion of creating an entire life for the character beyond and below what is actually said on stage.
In Building a Character, Stanislavski enjoins his actors to create an "inner stream of images, fed by all sorts of fictional inventions" which will form the "basis for everything the character does, his ambitions, thoughts, feelings . . .." If an actor in a play has to tell another actor that it is cold outside, she ought to run a film in her mind of the icy streets, the people with hunched shoulders wrapped up in scarves, her breath crystallizing in the air, so that the simple words "It's cold" emerge from a deep well of sensations and emotions. This technique is central to the psychological realism of mainstream drama since the war, and Pinter, broadly speaking, belongs to that tradition. There is, however, a crucial difference in his approach to this familiar idea of subtext. In Stanislavski's formulation, the subtext is there to support and enrich the text. The actor's fictional inventions are at the service of the greater invention of the play. Pinter, however, broke the connection. In his plays, the unstated subtext doesn't support the explicit statements that are on the surface; it attacks them. It doesn't add to their meaning, but drains away the meaning they seem to have.
Pinter's originality, in other words, lies in the extent to which the subtext diverges from the dialogue. The spoken words, however brilliantly playful, have the flat, impenetrable feel of an Andy Warhol picture, the sense of a surface unsupported by any volume, because the images and emotions that ought to give them depth exist on a completely different plane. They are outside the room and they have to stay outside, for if they became explicit, they would lose their force.
In No Man's Land, there are many hints at what might be outside the elegant lounge room, with its well-stocked but rapidly emptying bar. The two men who occupy it - Gambon's Hirst, a successful writer who owns the house, and Bradley's Spooner, a down-at-heel, marginal poet he has met on Hampstead Heath - seem to come into focus as the play goes on.
Spooner keeps talking about himself. Hirst's sinister minders, Foster and Briggs, also give us versions of their life stories. There is a mythological image to cling on to: Spooner offers himself to Hirst as his "boatman", apparently offering us a metaphorical understanding of him as a cypher for Charon, who ferries the dead across the no-man's-land between life and death. But these glimpses of "facts" and symbols work, not to dispel the mystery with which every play begins, but to deepen it. By tantalising us with the notion that there might be a narrative here, they simply draw attention to its absence.
What this means in practice is that a play like No Man's Landcan't be done with mediocre actors. It is a kind of test piece for absolute mastery of the art. The actor has to be able to do several things at once: to embody a "character" sufficiently coherent to infuse Pinter's marvellous language with the immediacy and precision it demands; to create the sense of a rich subtext beneath the words while refusing to reduce that subtext to any single meaning; and to do all of this while being simultaneously utterly bleak and very, very funny.
The sheer command with which Bradley and Gambon do all of this - and, crucially, do it together - makes the Gate production an exhilarating experience.
The double act is as finely tuned as Laurel and Hardy or Morcambe and Wise. Bradley is all language and Gambon is all physique. Bradley's brilliance lies in his capacity both to throw himself with comic relish into Pinter's verbal arias, leaping from word to word like a goat across mountain rocks, and to withhold himself from them with a querulous cock of his head and a sardonic twist of his lips.
Gambon's genius is in his silences - no actor is so riveting when he is just sitting in a chair, registering the surrounding drama on his face. He uses his big, bear-like body with astonishing grace to create two entirely different physical presences - the drunk who moves as if he were under water and the apparently sober figure of command and menace.
Between them, they create as great an exhibition of the actor's art as we're likely to see on a Dublin stage.
• No Man's Landruns at the Gate Theatre until September 20th
