No Man's Land - by Harold Pinter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"An oblique comedy of menace, unsettling, exquisitely wrought and written . . . a complex excursion into the by now familiar Pinter world of mixed reality and fantasy, of human worth and human degradation." (New York Times)

Set against the decayed elegance of a house in London's Hampstead Heath, in No Man's Land two men face each other over a drink. Do they know each other, or is each performing an elaborate character of recognition? Their ambiguity--and the comedy--intensify with the arrival of two younger men, the one ostensibly a manservant, the other a male secretary. All four inhabit a no man's land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination--a territory which Pinter explores with his characteristic mixture of biting wit, aggression, and anarchic sexuality that has continually made his plays masterpieces of the modern theater.

Review Quotes

Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature

"No Man's Land remains palpably the work of our best living playwright in its command of language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay." --Irving Wardle, The London Times

"The play is a masterly summation of all the themes that have long obsessed Pinter: the fallibility of memory, the co-existence in one man of brute strength and the sensitivity, the ultimate unknowability of women, the notion that all human contact is a battle between who and whom. ... It is in no sense a dry, mannerist work but a living theatrical experience full of rich comedy in which one speech constantly undercuts another." --Michael Billington, The Arts Guardian

"An oblique comedy of menace, unsettling, exquisitely wrought and written . . . a complex excursion into the by now familiar Pinter world of mixed reality and fantasy, of human worth and human degradation." --New York Times
"By turns funny, scary, and resonantly poetic . . . one of the handful of indisputable modern classics that Pinter has written, and a piece that will haunt and tantalise the memory." --Daily Telegraph
"A masterly summation of all the themes that have long obsessed Pinter: the fallibility of memory, the co-existence in one man of brute strength and sensitivity, the ultimate unknowability of women . . . a living, theatrical experience full of rich comedy in which one speech constantly undercuts another." --Guardian
"Very tightly constructed . . . [Pinter's characters are] great comic creations, treading effortlessly the knife-edge line that Pinter has drawn for them between the funny and the sinister." --New York Magazine

About the Author

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is one of the twentieth century's most highly recognized dramatists. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the David Cohen British Literature Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature, and the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre, as well as many other honors. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, No Man's Land, and Betrayal.