There are two unforgettable images in Rupert Goold’s production of Harold Pinter’s hypnotic play: one is of Michael Gambon’s Hirst, his battered face more jowly than ever, staring blankly into the audience; the other is of the same man bounding skittishly on in a smart suit in the morning. Hirst is a wealthy alcoholic, a literary man who lives in a prison of his own making. In Giles Cadle’s design, the bleak, masculine room is dominated by a huge bar laden with bottles and gilded with a medieval helmet and drinking horn. The summer light is blacked out by a vast expanse of red curtains.
Hirst has invited a guest back to his house: David Bradley’s seedy Spooner whom he picked up in a famous Hampstead pub. Spooner brings news of a world outside, described by the lank-haired Bradley in a nasal whine while downing several glasses of whisky. Like the tramp in Pinter’s ‘The Caretaker’, Spooner, who combines being a pot man at the Bull’s Head in Camden with literary pretensions, seizes on the possibility of finding a cosy berth in the house to the irritation of Hirst’s two employees, a menacing pair called Foster and Briggs who have youth and strength on their side. Nick Dunning swaggers scarily as Briggs, but David Walliams’s Foster is the weak link in the production, most uncomfortable when only required to stand on stage.
It’s hardly surprising that the first-night audience laughed when Briggs announces that Hirst’s financial adviser has cancelled because he ‘has found himself without warning in the centre of a vast aboriginal financial calamity’. Torn between his old fear of failure and ending up like Spooner, and his new fear of success and of a future like Hirst’s, Pinter wrote one of his most haunting plays, and Bradley and Gambon are the men to bring it to life.
If you go to a bar right before closing time and choose to speak to the drunkest person in the room you will get more out of the interaction than this play delivers.
David Walliams the weak link?! This is a serious understatement. He was SO bad, and this was made worse by the fact that the other three performers were more than SUBLIME. David Walliams managed to single-handedly destroy the flow of some very important scenes. As well as making an already ambigious play even more ambigious by the way he was acting. The first scene when he enters the stage, is so dreadfully acted, I felt like pulling him off stage and doing the performance myself. Even with the lines in my hand I could have put on a more believable performance. His acting was wooden and he genuinely looked bored at all times. He should stick to Little Britain. In fact, scrap that too... maybe he could swim the channel again?
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If you go to a bar right before closing time and choose to speak to the drunkest person in the room you will get more out of the interaction than this play delivers.
David Walliams the weak link?! This is a serious understatement. He was SO bad, and this was made worse by the fact that the other three performers were more than SUBLIME. David Walliams managed to single-handedly destroy the flow of some very important scenes. As well as making an already ambigious play even more ambigious by the way he was acting. The first scene when he enters the stage, is so dreadfully acted, I felt like pulling him off stage and doing the performance myself. Even with the lines in my hand I could have put on a more believable performance. His acting was wooden and he genuinely looked bored at all times. He should stick to Little Britain. In fact, scrap that too... maybe he could swim the channel again?