NO MAN’S LAND

UK, 2016, 120 minutes, Colour.
Ian Mc Kellen, Patrick Stewart, Owen Teale, Damien Maloney.
Directed by Sean Mathias.

No Man’s Land was written by Harold Pinter and first performed at the Wyndham Theatre, London, in 1975 with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. This is the filmed version of the National Theatre Live, again at the Wyndham Theatre, after a tour around England. This film version has a 20 minutes Q and A with the cast and the director, a very interesting conversation, informative as well as communicating the personalities of the cast and Sean Mathias.

This version of the play has been very well photographed, very judicious use of close-ups for performance as well is for reaction, well timed, giving the audience an opportunity to look at, listen to and appreciate the performance, the words and their meanings. In fact, this version is something of a masterclass as audiences watch Ian Mc Kellen and Patrick Stewart (who had performed together in the X Men series of films and on stage in Waiting for Godot).

The set is a circular room with an area above the walls with projected images of Hampstead Heath leaves.

The first act has the two stars as men who have met at the local pub and have gone home to have drinks and talk afterwards, even though they don’t know each other and, it soon appears, one is suffering from some kind of dementia. This first part is a tour de force for Ian Mc Kellen, speaking Pinter’s complex and literary lines, haranguing Patrick Stewart who is somewhat bewildered and reacts in a somewhat passive manner. They both drink a great deal of whiskey and vodka. The enjoyment of the performances and the language is paramount – whether one follows the narrative line or the variety of excursus in conversation.

Two men arrive at the end of the first act, one claiming to be the son of the owner, the other his friend whom he met on a street corner – some suggestiveness as there has been in reference to cruising on Hampstead Heath. The old man with dementia has gone out but returns in his dressing gown, quite bewildered, not knowing who Mc Kellen is, his having explained to the other two men that he was a friend, and much play on this.

At the beginning of the second act, Mc Kellen wakes and finds he is locked delete in the house, the older man coming in as a servant, offering him breakfast, serving it in hotel style, Mc Kellen actually enjoying the bacon and eggs, toast and jam with champagne. When Stewart returns, he is dressed in the most dapper fashion, the dementia seemingly gone but his remembering a great deal of the past, his time at Oxford before the war, his wife, his reputation as a Lothario having affairs. He mistakes Mc Kellen for a fellow author and carries on the conversation – with Mc Kellen going along with the pretence and developing the story of his wife’s infidelity as well as the other man’s affair with other women.

Mc Kellen says in the Q&A that this was the kind of small play that Pinter used to write for revues and the insertion of sketches, actors playing off each other. Mc Kellen also makes a plea for employment as a secretary and archivist – which the young man who re-enters claims that he does already.

The conversations continue, Pinter’s language and attraction in stimulus, and a final comment that in no man’s land time stops and people are caught.