In the 1970s, Hirst, an ageing man of means begins a night of heavy drinking in his drawing room with an anonymous peer whom he only just met at a pub. Hirst's talkative and somewhat disheveled guest, calling himself a poet, long-windedly explains how he is penetratingly perceptive, until he finally introduces himself as "Spooner". The pair becomes increasingly intoxicated, Hirst remaining quiet as Spooner rambles on, culminating in his taunting Hirst's masculinity and wife. Suddenly, Hirst rises and throws his glass, merely commenting "No man's land...does not move...or change...or grow old...remains...forever...icy...silent", before collapsing twice and crawling out of the room. Two domestic employees of Hirst's, younger men named Foster and Briggs, enter, talk aimlessly, and question Spooner, who now becomes the softspoken man in the room.
Hirst separately launches into a rant about once-known faces in his photo album, and all four men are soon present once more, drinking champagne. An odd dynamic emerges where Spooner first pities the younger men's employment but then ends up requesting employment from Hirst himself. After all this, Hirst merely replies "Let's change the subject for the last time", which he instantly regrets, since this is taken to mean that Hirst will be unable to change the subject ever again. He thinks back to his youth, when he mistakenly thought he saw a drowned body in a lake. Spooner now comments, "No. You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent." Hirst responds "I'll drink to that!" and the lights fade slowly to black.
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In reviewing Goold's revival of the play at the Duke of York's Theatre in 2008, Billington points out that "Hirst, a litterateur haunted by dreams and memories, is, as he tells Spooner, 'in the last lap of a race I had long forgotten to run'. But, while his servants conspire to lead Hirst to oblivion, Spooner attempts a chivalric rescue-act, dragging him towards the light of the living. The assumption is that his bid fails, as all four characters are finally marooned in a no-man's land 'which remains forever, icy and silent'."[2]
In this play replete with echoes of T. S. Eliot, Spooner may appear to have failed in his apparent efforts to ingratiate himself with and perhaps even to "rescue" Hirst from "drowning" himself in drink.[20] But Spooner still remains in the house at the end of the play, "in no man's land," along with Hirst (and Foster and Briggs), and the play ends in an impasse much like that of Pinter's 1960 play The Caretaker, to which critics compare No Man's Land.[3][21]
Do Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Foster. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and a time remembered, between reality and imagination.
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