March 8, 2006
No Man’s Land is a long way from Pinter’s famously gritty kitchen sink dramas, a late play set in the luxurious home of a successful author, liberally soused with champagne and single malts, bewildering reminiscences and flights of mad fancy. But this is not lightweight fare; the play seethes with bitter regret and a fearsome undercurrent of violence, and demands dizzying shifts of power, attraction and even character from the four roles. It’s a challenging piece, and as Spooner (a waspish, hand-flapping Oscar Wood) and Hirst (Ewan Roxburgh, intermittently exuding drunken charm) wander the sparsely furnished expanse of stage, they occasionally portray less the fannish admiration of an aging poet for the literary giant he has accidentally snagged, and more a drunken and none-too-successful Hampstead Heath pick-up. Wood skitters nervously around the stage while Roxburgh, welded to his chair, knocks back bladder-testing quantities of stage whisky, but neither really involves until the entrance of Hirst’s secretary, Foster (Edwin Thomas, eyes glittering with poorly-concealed resentment) kicks them into gear.
Thomas’s Foster is lean, hungry, bitter and astonishingly good-looking, a young British thug whose easy meal ticket has turned into the sour death of his ambitions in alcohol and confinement; while Tom Viita, airing an impressive range of swear-words and flights of sinister whimsy, makes a magnificently lugubrious, threatening and darkly funny Briggs, Hirst’s sinister “butler”. Wood seems most comfortable in his mistaken identity, delighting in the rapid exchange of confusing reminiscences about shameful affairs and Oxford misdemeanors, while Thomas makes Foster’s excitable jealousy at the sight of a rival (no matter how pathetic) a tangible, dangerous presence. At the centre of it, Roxburgh as Hirst is abrupt, frustrating and astonishingly charming, yet oddly absent, as if he had already left the play, and left the other characters playing court to his ghost.
Thomas’s Foster is lean, hungry, bitter and astonishingly good-looking, a young British thug whose easy meal ticket has turned into the sour death of his ambitions in alcohol and confinement; while Tom Viita, airing an impressive range of swear-words and flights of sinister whimsy, makes a magnificently lugubrious, threatening and darkly funny Briggs, Hirst’s sinister “butler”. Wood seems most comfortable in his mistaken identity, delighting in the rapid exchange of confusing reminiscences about shameful affairs and Oxford misdemeanors, while Thomas makes Foster’s excitable jealousy at the sight of a rival (no matter how pathetic) a tangible, dangerous presence. At the centre of it, Roxburgh as Hirst is abrupt, frustrating and astonishingly charming, yet oddly absent, as if he had already left the play, and left the other characters playing court to his ghost.