No Man’s Land

Cort Theatre, New York City

(212) 239-6200

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The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. In this nearly 40-year-old Harold Pinter gem, the playwright’s language has such “beguiling polish and shimmer” that stars Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart will make you wish you sounded just like them. As in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which the veteran British actors are performing in repertory with this play, much of the marvelous chatter serves in the end to illustrate how no one in this life ever really connects. Somehow, Sirs McKellen and Stewart turn that disheartening outlook into “remarkably accessible high comedy,” finding “the pure entertainment value in existential emptiness.”

No Man’s Land is “far more cryptic” than Godot in addressing that shared theme, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. As the play opens, two elderly writers who just met at a pub are continuing their drunken conversation, with the successful Hirst (Stewart) hosting the ne’er-do-well Spooner (McKellen) at his palatial home. In a way that’s “savage and funny, terse and hauntingly poetic,” they drunkenly exchange epigrams and recollections of their shared past while constantly challenging one another’s veracity. It remains unclear how these men know each other: Are they college chums? Lovers? Perfect strangers? But viewers soon enough get the sense that Spooner may feel trapped, and the duo’s increasingly uncivil game of one-upmanship eventually leaves the two men “locked in wintry silence.”

Stewart and McKellen shouldn’t be overpraised, said Brendan Lemon in the Financial Times. “I took more pleasure” in fact in co-stars Shuler Hensley and Billy Crudup, who play servants in Hirst’s household and prove more engaging because their performances feel less rehearsed. Still, it’s Stewart and McKellen who carry the evening, said Thom Geier in Entertainment Weekly. Their “almost kinetic camaraderie” is remarkably infectious, and with their “age-defying enthusiasm,” these two 70-something stars “manage the tricky feat of making challenging material engaging, fun, and ultimately life-affirming.”