➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣

Duke of York’s, 2008: Michael Gambon, David Bradley and Nick Dunning in No Man’s Land. (Photograph: Tristram Kenton)

❚ MICHAEL GAMBON WAS UNDOUBTEDLY Britain’s greatest living actor for much of his career and remained so until his death this week. So, indeed, Harold Pinter had also become our greatest playwright by the end of his life. In the week of Pinter’s death at Christmas 2008, Gambon was playing in the West End in this, one of the master’s most enduring plays, No Man’s Land, and on Boxing Day he marked the theatre’s loss in ways I shall never forget.

That day, on Radio 4’s World at One, Michael Gambon promised to give the performance of his life, so I determined to go and see again the performance I’d already enjoyed the previous month in one of the Pinter’s most haunting masterpieces about two men in their maturity reflecting on their tenuous – or had it been non-existent? – friendship. As Michael Billington had written in his Guardian review: “Every new production of Pinter’s tantalising, poetic play yields new meanings.”

I’d seen it premiered in 1975 with those grandees John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson at the Old Vic and again when transferred to the Lyttelton in 1977 – several times. The great air/earth partnership of Gielgud/Richardson undoubtedly brought compassion to the roles of Spooner and Hirst, yet when Pinter himself played “the Richardson role” at the Almeida in 1993, opposite the sprightly Paul Eddington, the author turned his second act opening almost into a two-handed farce that had us aching in our seats with continuous laughter and subsequently wondering whether he’d always longed for our two greatest actors to loosen up a bit in the original production.

By the time this day’s greatest living actor Gambon put on the mantle of Hirst, a litterateur haunted by dreams and memories, in this new production at the Duke of York’s, we had learnt to laugh heartily at the humour in Pinter, yet now both Gambon and David Bradley as Spooner were also suffusing the prose with more poetry which the renowned “Pinter pauses” punctuate than I could recall from the past.

Almeida theatre, 1993: Paul Eddington and Harold Pinter in his own play No Man’s Land. (Photograph: Tristram Kenton)

A month earlier, I’d been caught short by the intensity of Gambon’s stage presence as he made his demons all but tangible before us. Then on Boxing Day, after the hilarious Act 2 recollections of the men’s seemingly shared past, Gambon suddenly changed gear and dropped timbre to whisper the crucial “Good Ghost” speech about the passing faces in his photograph album with an ethereal beauty and clarity of Shakespearean proportions. It was an unparalleled moment to witness.

Following the curtain calls, the cast paused to pay brief onstage tributes to Pinter. Gambon told us that, after rehearsals, the playwright had asked him if he would read the Good Ghost speech at his funeral (which indeed he did only days later). Suddenly for the second time this night, Gambon delivered the speech again there and then. Alas the words lost something of the ineffable truth they had touched when, minutes earlier, Gambon had been in character and had delivered them “trippingly on the tongue”.

Without doubt, the actor brought greatness to the role of Hirst this night – in fairness, all the cast were on the balls of their feet too. More satisfying, in the fleeting moments of live performance, fresh glimpses had been revealed of Pinter’s bleak insights into memory and ageing. All in all, the essence of theatre.

➢ Billington’s review of No Man’s Land in The Guardian, 2008
➢ Michael Gambon’s obituary in The Guardian, 2023

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