About The Book

Harold Pinter’s latest full-length play is set against the decayed elegance of a house in London’s Hampstead Heath. Two men face each other over a drink. Do they know each other, or is each performing an elaborate charade of recognition? The 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.

No Man’s Land had a triumphant opening at London’s National Theatre, with Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud in the lead roles.

Praise

“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”a living theatrical experience full of rich comedy in which one speech constantly undercuts another.” —Michael Billington, The Arts Guardian

Awards

Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature