Adam Green at the Sugar Club and Harold Pinter's No Man's Landstarring Michael Gambon and David Walliams in his first serious role at the The Gate.
No Man's Land
The Gate Theatre, Dublin
At the beginning of his career, in 1958, Harold Pinter wrote: "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false." Good as his word, he has spent his professional life blurring those lines, finding both menace and mirth in the absence of easy meanings.
Reality and illusion are in constant battle in Pinter's 1975 play No Man's Land. Played out between two writers, its plot is distended by drink as the extravagantly successful novelist Hirst (Michael Gambon) stumbles around his den, decanting vodka and scotch. In return, his guest, a shabby poet named Spooner (David Bradley), decants increasingly unreliable stories of life among London literati.
This is hardly polite conversation: each anecdote is an aggressive ploy, designed to bewilder and overpower ("The point I'm trying to make, in case you missed it . . . "). Such chicanery can be hard going for an audience - so much so that when Hirst, imprisoned and sapped by success, makes a cryptic reference to "the last lap of a race I had long forgotten to run", even Spooner recognises it as a lifeline in a sea of confusion: "A metaphor. Things are looking up."
The question, as it so often is with Pinter, is not what is going on, but rather who is in control? For all the play's ambiguities, Rupert Goold's precise production never errs in its artful choreography of a power struggle. Bradley's cadaverous intruder - either friend or foe - watches dispassionately as Gambon literally crawls from the stage. Later, Hirst's fast-talking amanuensis Foster (David Walliams) and thuggish manservant Briggs (Nick Dunning) - in short, his attack dogs - circle Spooner with insincere charm and quite sincere malevolence.
The play is a performance piece on every level. Identities are continually manufactured and torn down as though a sinister game of improvisation. As Spooner, Bradley offers a nerveless creature of self-invention, but is also at mercy to the rules of the game, variously identified as a poet, a potman and - in the play's funniest scene - a once-cuckolded Oxford student named Charles.
With a play this prickly - some still contend that Pinter wrote it to cool the ardour of his following - there is an understandable urge to make it accessible. Hence, one suspects, David Walliams's appearance in his first stage role (if you discount Little Britain Live). Although an admirably restrained Walliams manages to hold his own, he is ultimately outclassed and anyone who comes in search of laughs is going to leave baffled.
Unsaddled by such expectations, Gambon, a masterful and generous performer, better understands the terrain, by turns an icy phantom haunted by memories, then a gleefully skipping fabulist. Nick Dunning, meanwhile, is so unnervingly good as a casually terrifying Briggs that he almost walks away with the play in his fist. As sturdy and assured as the production is, the play's game of true or false will always make its meaning teasingly elusive. It is as much as anyone can do to trace the void of No Man'sLand without plunging into it.
Runs until Sept 20th
PETER CRAWLEY
Adam Green
Sugar Club, Dublin
Adam Green's music feels like it was hatched in another era. The nervous acoustic stylings of his other band, The Moldy Peaches, have been banished to the cellar; instead, we have Scott Walker-esque tracks of gaudy, suspect value.
Green stumbles on stage with the poise of Adonis and the physique of Dave from accounts. Black tassels trail from his arms as he writhes his way through the tracks, sloshing his way around the stage and limp-wristedly attempting to destroy his mic stand throughout the set. The bone dry, burly baritone, though, remains largely resolute and in check, but his acerbic lyrics are lost in a ropy sound mix.
Green's velvety croons are wrapped in arrangements that crawled out of Tin Pan Alley. His band and backing singers try to construct lush orchestrations but the urge to fool around seems impossible to resist. And in this court of jokers, Green is the undoubted king.
The cabaret atmosphere of the Sugar Club is perfectly suited to Adam Green: his demeanour is of an elegant bar fly caught between two stools of music and mayhem, all drink-stained velvet, expensive aftershave and cheap cigarettes. His lipstick-smeared shtick works best on Jessica(a song about Ms Simpson), I Wanna Dieand I Like Drugs(you don't have to dig deep for meaning here), but the orchestrations are too derivative. Green's intoxicated antics seem as thoughtfully constructed as his complex arrangements and in the end if feels inauthentic.
His lyrics are wilfully offensive in parts, on stage he's got drink-addled composure, his music is self-indulgent and frequently out of focus - and therein lies the charm. The young crowd loves it, but Green seems to be a figure who bemuses rather than enthrals and it's impossible to treat any of it seriously.
LAURENCE MACKIN
