Concrete Playground

A lot of things are difficult in No Man's Land: working out who's who and what's true and what time it is and just how many drinks you've had. This applies both to the audience and to those onstage, in whose strange world an hour and a half of our time and at least a day and a half of theirs is more than enough. This is not to say this production isn't very good, because it is: it's good enough to be a difficult experience, one in which the audience is bounced between laughing and looking full-face into the void.

"[It] IS funny, up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be funny, and it is because of that point that I wrote it." Pinter made this statement about one of his early plays, but it seems applicable to them all. The setting of a Pinter play is strikingly real, its dialogue is believably conversational, and it tends to be hilarious — up to that point where things tip absurdly over into some of the bleakest moments possible onstage.

As the main characters Hirst and Spooner, veterans John Gaden and Peter Carroll live up to their showcase casting by giving clever and affecting performances. If there are occasions where No Man's Land feels a bit like an exercise in 'Ladies and gentlemen, Gaden and Carroll, at their best!', well, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Audiences having developed admiration and affection for an actor doesn't mean that their work is no longer good, and the play itself is one that benefits from the comfort of familiar faces. Andrew Buchanan and Steven Rooke are also good in the supporting roles of Briggs and Foster, giving performances that are broadly comedic over suggestions of real threat and spite.

This is a solid production, committed to getting across a difficult play in a way that does service to it and addresses the audience on through its innate merits rather than some kind of transformative reworking. The set itself looks like somewhere you'd want to live, and the costumes have some pretty nice one-liners all on their own. Productions like this sometimes suffer by virtue of their very seamlessness, ending up lacking in impact, but in this case the possibility of immersion in the fictional world the play puts forward and the realisation of the very nasty things indeed abounding within it makes No Man's Land sneakily devastating.