No Man’s Land: a Variation on Harold Pinter’s Theme of “Menace”

Though being one of the representative works in the second phase of Pinter’s writing in the 1970s, No Man's Land is more an extension of than a departure from his early comedies of menace. To a certain degree, the central motif of the play is still a variation on the theme of territory fight explored in such plays as The Caretaker. What makes his play unique is that the major conflict is no longer a fight for the “room" in the sense of existential significance, but for a much more private “territory” of the innermost soul embodied by the past and memory.