No Man’s Land Review, Theatre Royal, Brighton | Chichester Observer | 23 August 2016

"Damien Molony and Owen Teale as Foster and Briggs stay just on the right side of being threatening – are they staff, family, lovers or jailers? Often coming across as bullies, they reveal themselves as educated and eloquent in their own ways, and perhaps there is no escape for them either.

Director Sean Mathias ensures that the play works on so many levels, with its complicated characters, enchanting poetic quality and a humour darker than night and colder than winter. He is aided brilliantly by Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set design, Adam Cork’s sound design and Nina Dunn’s projection design, which all add to the questioning about whether this is something unfinished, artificial, ethereal or imaginary.

By the end we continue wondering if this no man’s land is a place of limbo between life and death, or a dreamlike state between waking and sleeping, or a place between battlegrounds. And are the characters individuals with uncertain memories or aspects of each other?

The sheer quality of this production, with a cast dramatically bowling the most amazing googlies, means that however hard Pinter’s work may be to define, the audience wants to know the answers. It may leave the theatre in a state of bemusement, but it has been rewarded by a sublime and beautiful production."