Pinter revival lauded by critics

Harold Pinter turned up last night for the latest West End production of his 1974 play No Man's Land, starring Michael Gambon, David Bradley and Little Britain's David Walliams, and will be delighted to know that the first reviews were close to ecstatic.

Gambon (pictured above with, from left, Bradley, Walliams and Pinter at the first night party) is "magnificient" as the alcoholic writer Hirst, according to the Guardian's Michael Billington, while Walliams, in his first serious stage role, is "dazzlingly assured" as Foster, one of his two thuggish male housekeepers, says Nicholas de Jongh in the London Evening Standard.

Billington, who awards the play four stars, says Gambon's performance as Hirst "seems to exist in two dimensions at once". de Jongh was even more gushing about the production, saying that he had "never seen a Pinter play so possessed by deathly foreboding, menace and covert gay desire" and that it was permeated by "athletic flights of black comedy".

But unlike de Jongh, Billington was less certain about Walliams, saying that he "strangely misses the Orton-esque sexual banditry implied by a description of the character as "a vagabond cock".

However, he praised director Rupert Goold, who first directed the work at the Gate theatre, Dublin, for capturing Pinter's "strange, spectral world" on the stage, as well as David Bradley's Spooner, who he said "memorably combines a predatory poverty with a touching gallantry". And De Jongh commended Nick Dunning's "splendid, thuggish Briggs."

Billington concludes: "This is a compelling revival...And when audience and cast finally joined in applauding Pinter, seated in a box, I felt it was in recognition of an eerily disturbing play that transports us into a world somewhere between reality and dream." ·