Simon Russell Beale and Rupert Everett star in a major revival of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Donmar Warehouse, 13 February to 10 April 2027.
Harold Pinter wrote No Man’s Land in 1975 and gave it to Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, which set the pattern: it has been a two-hander for great old actors ever since, and the parts have gone to Gambon and Rylance, McKellen and Stewart. Two men in a Hampstead house, drinking through a night. One is a wealthy writer who has stopped writing; the other has attached himself and will not leave. They may have been at Oxford together. They may never have met. The play declines to say, and the pleasure of it is watching two performers decide, moment by moment, how much either of them believes.
It is Pinter at his most linguistically extravagant and least explained, and it is funnier in performance than on the page. The title comes from a line about a place that never moves, never changes, never grows older, and remains forever icy and silent, which is as close to a statement of subject as Pinter ever put in a play.
Simon Russell Beale and Rupert Everett play it at the Donmar Warehouse from Saturday 13 February to Saturday 10 April 2027. Two actors of that billing in a two-hundred-and-fifty-seat room is the hardest ticket the Donmar sells, and eight weeks closes the theatre’s announced season. Everett does almost no stage work; that is the part of this booking to notice.