Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Screenplay by HAROLD PINTER...
Always a shrewd, careful scenarist (Accident, The Go-Between), Harold Pinter pays particular attention to the functional unreality of moviemaking. In one scene-not from Fitzgerald-a film editor expires noiselessly during the running of a new film. He is slumped in the front-row leather armchair, head rolled to one side in what must have been a last act of deference to the assembled executives. No last words, not even a cry for help. "He probably didn't want to disturb the screening," muses one of the nabobs...
Over the years it has gradually become the mark of the philistine to search for the meaning of a Pinter play. Presumably one may compound the charge of philistinism by suggesting that No Man's Land is substantially meaningless. This does not prevent it from being eruptively funny, elegiacally melancholy and wonderfully literate...
...emphasis has to be on words, mood and states of being. The words are brilliantly deployed. The mood is autumnal. The states of being are growing old, needing companionship, the slithering instability of illusion and reality, the burden of the artist and the elusive tapes of memory. Yet Pinter's underlying concern seems to hover offstage, a case of the middle-age megrims which, at the age of 46, Pinter may well feel or have felt when he was writing No Man's Land. It is at that point that the first bayoneting intimations of mortality strike home...
...happens that Hirst, Spooner, Foster and Briggs are the names of renowned 19th and early 20th century cricket players. Whatever Pinter, an ardent cricket fan, may have intended by that, No Man 's Land is a hilarious mine field of gamesmanship. The English relish putting each other down socially, intellectually and psychologically, and some of them are formidably adept at it. Pinter does it to perfection...