text: A production directed by Sean Mathias opened at Berkeley Rep in August 2013, with Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley. It opened on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre, in repertory with Waiting for Godot, on 24 November 2013 (previews began on 31 October 2013). It closed on 30 March 2014, but was restaged in the UK in 2016, with Owen Teale and Damien Molony replacing Hensley and Crudup. It played at the Sheffield Lyceum, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Brighton Theatre Royal and Cardiff New Theatre before transferring to Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End.
  The play was staged as the closing production of Steppenwolf Theatre Company's 2022-2023 season in Chicago, under the direction of Les Waters with theatre co-founder Jeff Perry (American actor) playing Hirst.
  Critical reception and interpretation
  In reviewing the London première, on 24 April 1975, Michael Billington, of The Guardian, observes that the play 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. ... 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.