WSC Avant Bard gives us a treat: a fine production of one of Harold Pinter’s less-produced plays of menace in an enclosed space, No Man’s Land (1975). Pinter’s fascination with abrupt shifts of dominance and usurpation is one of the strongest themes of this production: it’s never clear from one moment to the next whether Briggs (Bruce Alan Rauscher) and Foster (Frank Britton) are housekeeper and secretary to Hirst (ever-powerful Brian Hemmingsen) in his well-appointed Hampstead home, or his jailers. Imagine Veronica’s Room with more homoeroticism and even more peeping.
The opening scene springs from Hirst’s inviting Spooner (Christopher Henley) in for a drink. Twenty-five minutes later, Hirst is falling-down drunk and the scene unspools into slow-motion slapstick. Henley makes the most of Spooner’s weediness, with a sick little smile and a delight in uttering words like periphrastic and sequesteredness as if they were much smuttier than they are.
Rauscher’s second act monologue plays to his strengths: he’s a bemused thug telling the story of how he once gave directions to Foster about how to get to Bolsover Street (in Rauscher’s dialect choice, this sounds more like the so-appropriate Balls-Over Street).
One can read the coda section of the second act as an explanation of this enigmatic sequence of meetings, or as one more mystery to unpick.
- No Man’s Land, by Harold Pinter, directed by Tom Prewitt, WSC Avant Bard, Theatre on the Run, Arlington, Va.