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1 Know the Show compiled and arranged by the Education Department of the Shakespeare Theatre Know the Show support materials compiled and arranged by the Education Department of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

2 The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man s Land 2 About the Playwright: Harold Pinter Harold Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, a working-class neighborhood in London s East End, the son of a tailor. Both of his parents were English-born Jews. As a child Pinter got along well with his mother, but clashed with his father, who was a strong disciplinarian. At the outbreak of World War II, Pinter was evacuated from the city to Cornwall, where he lived with 26 other boys in a castle along the coast. This experience of being wrenched from his parents was a traumatic and formative event for the 10- year old Pinter. The condition of being bombed has never left me, Pinter later said. Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he acted in school productions, directed by an English teacher who became his mentor, Joseph Brearley. English literature, particularly poetry, became one of Pinter s main interests. He avidly read the work of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. He also ran track and played cricket a sport which became a lifelong passion for him. In 1948, Pinter enrolled in London s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but left after two unhappy years in which he skipped most of his classes. Around the same time, Pinter was fined by magistrates for having, as a conscientious objector, refused to do his national military service. Pinter had two trials. I could have gone to prison - I took my toothbrush to the trials - but it so happened that the magistrate was slightly sympathetic, so I was fined instead, thirty pounds in all. Perhaps I ll be called up again in the next war, but I won t go. Pinter s father paid the fine in the end, a substantial sum of money at the time. In 1950 Pinter started to publish poems in Poetry (London) under the name Harold Pinta. He worked as a bit-part actor on a BBC Radio program, Focus on Football Pools. He also studied for a short time at the Central School of Speech and Drama and toured Ireland from 1951 to 1952 with a Shakespearean troupe. In 1953 he appeared during Donald Wolfit s 1953 season at the King s Theatre in Hammersmith. After four more years in provincial repertory theatre under the pseudonym David Baron, Pinter began to write for the stage. The Room (1957), originally written for Bristol University s drama department, was finished in four days. A Slight Ache, Pinter s first radio piece, was broadcast on the BBC in His first fulllength play, The Birthday Party, was first performed by Bristol University s drama department in 1957 and produced in 1958 in the West End. The play, which closed with disastrous reviews after one week, dealt in a Kafkaesque manner with an apparently ordinary man who is threatened by strangers for an unknown reason. He tries to run away but is tracked down. Although most reviewers were hostile, Pinter produced in rapid succession the body of work which made him the master of the comedy of menace. I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people, Pinter said decades later in an interview. We don t need critics to tell the audiences what to think. Pinter s major plays often originate from a single, powerful visual image. They are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. The struggle for survival or identity dominates the action. Language is not only used as a means of communication but as a weapon. Beneath the words, silences may indicate rage, domination, or fear of intimacy. Pinter s dialogue is as tightly - perhaps more tightly - controlled than verse, Martin Esslin writes. Every syllable, every inflection, the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the discontinuity, the circularity of ordinary vernacular speech are here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his linguistic ballet. Several of Pinter s plays were originally written for British radio or TV. Beginning in the 1960s, he also directed several of his dramas, and went on to direct plays by other authors as well. Closely associated with the director Sir Peter Hall, he became an associate director of the National Theatre after Hall was nominated as the successor of Sir Lawrence Olivier. In the 1990s Pinter became more active as a director than as a playwright. After Betrayal (1978) Pinter wrote no new full-length plays until Moonlight (1994). Following the overthrow of Chile s President Allende in 1973, Pinter became active in human rights issues. His opinions were often controversial. During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Pinter condemned NATO s intervention, saying it would only aggravate the misery and the horror and devastate the country. In his speech to an antiwar meeting at the House of Commons in November 2002, Pinter joined the world-wide debate over the so-called preventive war against Iraq: Bush has said: We will not allow the world s worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world s worst leaders. Quite right. Look in the mirror, chum. That s you. In February 2005 Pinter announced in an interview that he had decided to abandon his career as a playwright and put all his energy into politics. I ve written 29 plays. Isn t that enough? Pinter received many awards, including the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear in 1963, BAFTA awards, including in 1996 the Laurence Olivier Award for lifetime achievement in the theatre. In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 2005, Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in 2002, and continued to work and write despite his declining health for several years. Harold Pinter died on December 24, 2008, in London. In His Own Words: I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did. Once, many years ago, I found myself engaged uneasily in a public discussion on the theatre. Someone asked me what my work was about. I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this line of enquiry: The weasel under the cocktail cabinet. That was a great mistake. Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns. It has now seemingly acquired a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful observation about my own work. But for me the remark meant precisely nothing. Such are the dangers of speaking in public.

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man s Land 3 Commentary and Criticism If you know your Pinter, the underlying message is clear: someone is foolishly getting into a situation

3 The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man s Land 3 Commentary and Criticism If you know your Pinter, the underlying message is clear: someone is foolishly getting into a situation that he won t be able to understand, handle or escape... There they are, stuck with their memories, hopes, insecurities and illusions. It s like watching four failed explorers marooned in Antarctica. Benedict Nightingale The Times of London, 10/10/08 In broad outline, No Man s Land could be made to sound like a re-tread of the earlier classic, The Caretaker. Once again, a stranger, invited into a living space, opportunistically tries to settle himself there on a permanent basis by sowing dissension among the occupants, only to be stymied by the powers of the status quo ante. Instead of a tramp, the interloper is Spooner, the failed, down-at-heel poet whom Hirst, the grand man of letters, has picked up in a Hampstead pub. But, as this production suggests with a comic eeriness and pervasive poetry, the later play is much more subjective and dream-like, almost as if the participants Spooner, Hirst, and the latter s jumped-up thuggish minders, Foster and Briggs were warring aspects of a single psychic economy. Paul Taylor The Independent, 10/09/08 Amid much crude and ribald language and some hilariously filthy one-liners, there are passages that recall T.S. Eliot at his finest... Even after three decades I cannot claim fully to understand this haunting drama that proves by turns funny, scary, and resonantly poetic, but I have no doubt that it is one of the handful of indisputable modern classics that Pinter has written, and a piece that will haunt and tantalise the memory of all who see it. Charles Spencer The Telegraph, 10/08/08 Harold Pinter s new play, No Man s Land, is about precisely what its title suggests: the sense of being caught in some mysterious limbo between life and death, between a world of brute reality and one of fluid uncertainty. But although plenty of plays, from Sweeny Agonistes to Outward Bound, have tried to pin down that strange sense of reaching into a void, I can think of few that have done so as concretely, funnily and concisely as Pinter s. In one way, 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 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: a devastating four-letter word indictment of Spooner, for instance, is followed by Hirst s yes, yes, but he s a good man at heart: I knew him at Oxford, and the minutely-timed laugh would not disgrace Jack Benny. Pinter s achievement, in fact, is to have treated comically a theme that most writers tackle with sententious gravity: that at any moment in time the real, tangible world may turn out to be an illusion. Michael Billington The Guardian, 04/24/75 No theory will exhaust this play s possibilities; but here it comes over as a drama of the alternative fates of a single man two diverging roads; one leading to poverty and failure, but preserving a margin of hope; the other leading to fame and security, but at the price of creative impotence and imprisonment. And when their routes finally converge, each recognises the other as what, but for a stroke of good or bad luck, he might have been. Where do they meet? Joining the queue of those who have tried to crack the cryptic title, I suggest the dramatic equivalent of a neurological synapse: a no-man s-land between two cells where information can pass without the restrictions that operate inside the cellular system. Past and present are obliterated, and any thought can freely bubble to the surface. Irving Wardle The Independent, 02/14/93 Foster (Derek Wilson), Hirst (Edmond Genest) and Spooner (Sherman Howard) share a menacing moment in The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey s 2010 Main Stage production of No Man s Land. Photo Joe Geinert.

4 The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man s Land 4 Director Bonnie J. Monte s Thoughts on No Man s Land No Man s Land: 1) Land under dispute by two opposing parties, especially the field of battle between the lines of two opposing entrenched armies; 2) an area of uncertainty or ambiguity; 3) a piece of land outside the north wall of London that was assigned as a place of execution; 4) a place of refuge that forbids any external intrusion Apparently, Harold Pinter once received a letter that read: Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play. Pinter is said to have replied as follows: Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to these questions I cannot fully understand your letter. Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1917 T.S. Eliot Spooner (Sherman Howard, standing) converses with Hirst (Edmond Genest) while Briggs (Paul Mullins) and Foster (Derek Wilson) look on in The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey s 2010 Main Stage production of No Man s Land. Photo Gerry Goodstein. Before his death in 2008, there were many who considered Harold Pinter the world s greatest living playwright. I was one of that group. There were, and are, many who consider his plays to be obtuse, threatening, annoying or just plain boring. His work continues to provoke controversy and much debate. I think he was a giant amongst playwrights for many reasons, not the least of which because he introduced a new form and a new step in the progression of realistic drama, though he is often called an absurdist. Whether one is a fan or not, one cannot deny that his linguistic dexterity, his comedic and poetic powers, and his ability to provoke are prodigious his themes universal, archetypal and often epic. His work continues to be dissected and probed by literary and drama critics, psychoanalysts, dream analysts, scholars, teachers, directors, actors, and of course, the viewers of his plays. I think many of his plays will stand the test of time and fall into the elite group of classic masterworks that bridge all eras and cultures. And I think that No Man s Land, without a doubt, falls into that category. Like Hamlet and King Lear, or any great drama, it defies concise definition and analysis, and like those plays, it presents a vast number of different interpretations, and has a very different impact on each person who sees or reads it. It deals, at its core, with the same issues that Shakespeare deals with in his great works, albeit in a very different poetic form. There are neither definitively correct interpretations of Pinter s works, nor incorrect ones; like any great poem or piece of art, they are, ultimately, given their meaning by the viewer or reader. Working on Pinter, both as an actor and director, does require one to be a sort of detective. One attempts to decipher language patterns and devices, pauses, silences, things that seem to be symbols (one is never quite sure), archetypal connections, behavior, and literary allusions in order to define the various levels of meaning in which one has to immerse oneself in order to create a way to play the music of his plays. I think they exist on so many parallel dimensions: reality, super-reality, symbolic, metaphorical, dream life, internal and external; and instinct often leads the way in directing a Pinter piece. The meaning of what you see this evening is up to you. However, I do encourage you to stay after the performance for our nightly talk-back with myself and the actors. And, if you are so inclined, there are numerous sources one can access in order to learn more about this play, or about Mr. Pinter s entire canon.* Coincidentally and happily, Lady Antonia Fraser s memoir, Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter will soon be available. What began as a scandalous affair with Pinter in the 1970 s evolved into a long and devoted romance, and Lady Antonia s memoir, I think, can shed some glimmers of light on No Man s Land.

5 The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey The Play s the Thing Know the Show 5 More than anything, I encourage you to just let the play hit you viscerally. Since there is no agreement on its meaning, trying to make sense of it intellectually while one is watching it, will, I think, diminish one s ability to just sense what it means for you. No one is expected to walk out with a fully articulated estimation of its implications. No matter what, I encourage you to be open to its humor, its poetry, its wonderful mystery, its allegories and its spectacular ability to simultaneously reside in everfluctuating realms of time, space, and perception. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow. The Hollow Men, 1925 T.S. Eliot Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying. Ash Wednesday, 1930 T.S. Eliot The fabric never breaks. The wound is open. The wound is contained. The wound is peopled. Harold Pinter A Note on Shakespeare Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, 1952 Dylan Thomas *Some interesting things to read in relation to No Man s Land and Harold Pinter s canon: The Peopled Wound: TheWork of Harold Pinter by Martin Esslin Pinter: The Playwright by Martin Esslin The Dream Structure of Pinter s Plays: A Psychoanalytic Approach by Lucina Paquet Gabbard Pinter s Plays: A Selected Chronology THE ROOM (1957) THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (1957) THE DUMB WAITER (1957) A SLIGHT ACHE (1958) THE HOTHOUSE (1958) THE CARETAKER (1959) THE DWARFS (1960) THE COLLECTION (1961) THE LOVER (1962) THE HOMECOMING (1964) OLD TIMES (1970) NO MAN S LAND (1974) BETRAYAL (1978) THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT S WOMAN (screenplay- 1980) OTHER PLACES (1982) ONE FOR THE ROAD (1984) THE HANDMAID S TALE (screenplay- 1987) THE NEW WORLD ORDER (1991) MOONLIGHT (1994) ASHES TO ASHES (1996) CELEBRATION (1999) SLEUTH (screenplay- 2007) No Man s Land as Dream Play by Prapassaree T. Kramer No Man s Land: A Variation on Harold Pinter s Theme of Menace by Hongwei Chen The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man s Land 6 Sources for this study guide (and other resources): Batty, Mark. About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber, 2005.

org www.wikipedia.org About The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey The acclaimed Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is one of the leading Shakespeare theatres in the nation.

Through its distinguished productions and education programs, the company strives to illuminate the universal and lasting relevance of the classics for contemporary audiences.

6 The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man s Land 6 Sources for this study guide (and other resources): Batty, Mark. About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber, Billington, Michael. The Life and Works of Harold Pinter. London: Faber, Raby, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, About The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey The acclaimed Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is one of the leading Shakespeare theatres in the nation. Serving nearly 100,000 adults and children annually, it is New Jersey s only professional theatre company dedicated to Shakespeare s canon and other classic masterworks. Through its distinguished productions and education programs, the company strives to illuminate the universal and lasting relevance of the classics for contemporary audiences. The longest-running Shakespeare theatre on the east coast, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey marks its 48th season in In addition to producing and presenting classic theatre, the Theatre s mission places an equal focus on education both for young artists and audiences of all ages. The Theatre nurtures emerging new talent for the American stage and cultivates future audiences by providing extensive student outreach opportunities. Through our work, we endeavor to promote literacy, civilization, community, cultural awareness, the theatrical tradition, and a more enlightened view of the world in which we live and the people with whom we share it. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is one of 20 professional theatres in the state of New Jersey. The company s dedication to the classics and commitment to excellence sets critical standards for the field. Nationwide, the Theatre has emerged as one of the most exciting new theatres under the leadership of Artistic Director Bonnie J. Monte since It is one of only a handful of Shakespeare Theatres on the east coast, and in recent years has drawn larger and larger audiences and unprecedented critical acclaim. The opening of the intimate, 308-seat F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre in 1998, provided the Theatre with a stateof-the-art venue with excellent sightlines, and increased access for patrons and artists with disabilities. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is a member of ArtPride, The Shakespeare Theatre Association of America, Theatre Communications Group, and is a founding member of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance. Spooner (Sherman Howard) in The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey s 2010 Main Stage production of No Man s Land. Photo Gerry Goodstein. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is an independent, professional theatre located on the Drew University campus. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey s programs are made possible, in part, by funding from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/ Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional major support is received from The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the F. M. Kirby Foundation, The Edward T. Cone Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and Drew University, as well as contributions from numerous corporations, foundations, government agencies and individuals. Crystal Rock Bottled Water is the official water supplier of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Significant support for The Shakespeare Theatre s 2010 education programs is provided by Ameriprise Financial, Investors Savings Bank, The Merrill G. and Emita E. Hastings Foundation, and The Provident Bank Foundation. Media Partner

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Announces Epic Line-up for its 2019 Season

Media Contact: Joe Guerin Marketing Manager JGuerin@ShakespeareNJ.org 973-845-6743 January 7, 2019 The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Announces Epic Line-up for its 2019 Season MADISON, NJ The Shakespeare