No Man’s Land
Duke of York’s, London
How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found
Southwark Playhouse, London
The Girl with a Pearl Earring
Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
NO MAN’S land: as the world reels from the shocks of the credit crunch or sits sunk in a stupor in front of celebrity culture, it sometimes feels that we are all living a frozen existence. Waiting for real life to start, waiting for a change. Between and betwixt. In two revivals, veteran playwright Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and young playwright Fin Kennedy’s How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, this sense of alienation swims clearly into view.
With Pinter’s 1975 classic, we enter the classy home of Hirst, a rich and powerful man who has invited a piss-artist, the impoverished Spooner, into his elegant abode. But when, after a drunken evening, Spooner makes a bid to become Hirst’s friend, he is thrown out by the other man, supported by his bully boys, Foster and Briggs. His territory remains defended and inviolable.
It is a fine and subtle play. Hirst is introduced as an eminent writer, but he is a person who morphs through several identities. First, he’s an almost speechless drunk; then he is a merry prankster who seems to share a university past with Spooner; then he becomes a Buddha, seated and watching a frozen world. His servants, Foster and Briggs, are thugs, but they love mind games.
Spooner, the outsider, doesn’t have a chance. As with the others, there is a lot of ambiguity about his identity. Is he really a poet or does he just help out at a local bar? Is he a down-and-out or just a bohemian freeloader? Has he ever met Hirst before? The charm of ambiguity is that it challenges you to keep more than one idea in your mind — and it results in fabulous performances. Actors, after all, love to play these “Am-I-or-aren’t-I?” roles.
This production, directed by the over-rated Rupert Goold and first seen in Dublin earlier this year, is a disappointment. He seems to have flushed ambiguity down the toilet and asked his actors to take the story only at face value. For Goold, this is merely a tale of an unwanted visitor, who drinks too much of his host’s whisky and is then ejected in the cold light of morning.
With no time for subtlety, even great actors such as Michael Gambon (Hirst) and David Bradley (Spooner) struggle to inject some life into this limping production. But don’t leave at the interval: the second half is better than the first and Gambon’s gleefully hopping morning scene gets off to a cracking start. At no point, however, did I feel that either actor was really relating to the other, or exploring the subtlety of the parts.
I’ve deliberately left the box office draw, the celebrity, to the end. Little Britain’s David Walliams plays Foster, or rather strolls slowly and stolidly through the role. Although Goold and the producers must be rubbing their hands at the prospect of attracting the punters, who pay through the nose, by using Walliams, he’s actually not very good. Save your money.
By contrast, Fin Kennedy’s How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found is an exciting and award-winning play about a stressed young executive who walks out on his life. First put on in Sheffield in 2007 and now restaged by Ellie Jones, its superb form (in which the central character is both alive and dead at the same time) is both entertaining and raises questions about identity.
Who are we? Can we be happy? Do we need to steal someone else’s identity in order to start again? Set in the no man’s land between Christmas and the New Year, Kennedy’s drama now feels even more relevant since the credit crunch has focused our attention on the invisible economy of branding and banking. In the end, as this excellent morality play makes clear, we can escape everything but ourselves.
Aleks Sierz
TRACEY CHEVALIER’S 1999 bestseller, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, has been translated into 36 languages and sold more then three million copies worldwide. Five years ago, it was made into a highly acclaimed movie starring Scarlett Johannson and Colin Firth and now, in its latest incarnation, has been adapted by David Joss Buckley into a turgid play at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.
I’m unsure what the fuss is about. While Joe Dowling’s slow and unimpressive production is interesting in parts – if you want to focus just on Fotini Dimou’s wonderful costumes – these are so few and far between that, in these credit crunch times, it really would be advisable to avoid this production. Stay at home and, if you need some cheering up, why not buy some paints and try your hand at your own masterpiece?
The story centres on struggling
17th-century Protestant painter Johannes Vermeer (Adrian Dunbar). His Catholic wife Catharina (Lesley Vickerage) has borne him several children, but still something is missing. Enter 17-year-old maid Griet (Kimberley Nixon) who becomes his muse. However, she is removed from the family home because her power is such that she is seen a threat to its very foundations.
Of the cast, the only notable performances come from Sara Kestelman as Maria Thins and Nial Buggy as Van Ruijven. Peter Mumford’s set is like practically everything else in this production: uninspiring.
Sharon Garfinkel
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