Everything is symmetrical (chairs on each side of an oriental rug on the floor and elegant tapestry hanging in back, slick lamps -- 2 tall, 2 squat with white shades) in the drawing room in Hirst's North London home. All is centered by a cabinet holding liquor. Everything that is said or happens is affected by drinking, which Hirst and Spooner keep up as they have since meeting at Jack Straw's Castle pub. Hirst, a wealthy popular writer, serves downtrodden poet Spooner, but the host's cordiality comes "by the book." What's under the surface?
This intrigues throughout, with appropriately Pinteresque silences, non sequitors, and mysteries. "All we have left is the English language," according to Spooner -- if it can be salvaged. Experience is unimportant; he's interested in being "eternally present and active." Not Hirst, who drinks himself into a stupor, finding "no man's land...icy, cold, silent." Exit the host, crawling. Enter Foster in black leather jacket and sneakers, maintaining Hirst is his father. Next comes Briggs, claiming he knows Spooner. They seem threatening. Time for Hirst to return and reminisce, for Foster to denigrate him while exaggerating his own importance. There follow dreams, a dinner (eggs and champagne!), an exchange of memories (mostly of women), questioning whether or not there can be change.
Who are the men, really? Nicholas Calderbank makes Hirst a handsome, sophisticated "no man," rich but impenetrable. Geoffrey Bateman's Spooner is by turns cordial, too loquacious, frightened, generous, sorrowful. It would be hard to be more insidious than Damian Corcoran and Michael Morris as the young servants (?), relatives (?), teddy boys (!). Do they use Hirst or are they used? Director Dana Burns Westberg makes clear that nothing is clear in a "no man's land" where men drown their psyches in drink and see men drowning in their dreams. Under crisp-clear lighting, the atmosphere remains thick as an old London fog.
