text: Both Billington and Paul Taylor (in The Independent) give the production 4 out of 5 stars, while Charles Spencer, reviewing the production in The Daily Telegraph, like other critics making inevitable comparisons with the original production, rates it as "equally fine, with Michael Gambon and David Bradley rising magnificently to the benchmark set by their illustrious predecessors," but points out that he too does not feel that he fully understands it: "Even after three decades I cannot claim fully to understand this haunting drama that proves by turns funny, scary, and resonantly poetic, but I have no doubt that it is one of the handful of indisputable modern classics that Pinter has written, and a piece that will haunt and tantalise the memory of all who see it."
  In another feature on Goold's 2008 revival, following the responses of "three Pinter virgins" who did not understand or enjoy it ("Matilda Egere-Cooper, urban music journalist: 'Obscure and exhausting' "; "David Knott, political lobbyist: 'Don't expect to feel uplifted...' "; and "Susie Rushton, editor and columnist: 'Where's the joke?' "), the Independents critic, Paul Taylor, reiterates his praise of No Man's Land, concluding:
  What is less clear is the purpose of the play's undercurrent of homosexuality. In the opening scene there are repeated references to scopophilia and Spooner asks Hirst if he often hangs "around Hampstead Heath" and the pub Jack Straw's Castle, both notorious for homosexual activity in the 1960s and ‘70s. Most analysts have tended to ignore this subtext but it is there. With this and lines with double meaning like "You had a cottage?" as well as oblique but explicit references to baleful mothers, "quaint little perversions", women "especially in Siam or Bali", "Lord Lancer", a man called Bunty and male virginity, it seems likely that Pinter is playing a joke of some kind on more naive critics and admirers.