There’s a famous speech in Pinter’s No Man’s Land which involves, of all irrelevant places, Bolsover Street in London W1. According to the sinister servants played by David Walliams and Nick Dunning in Rupert Goold’s sensitive yet bold and funny revival, the area boasts a one-way system so perilously intricate that those who enter it may never find their way out. And if you know your Pinter the underlying message is clear: someone is foolishly getting into a situation that he won’t be able to understand, handle or escape.

Since the play’s premiere in 1975, that coded speech has been directed at John Gielgud, Paul Eddington and John Wood, all of whom have brought distinction to Spooner, the shabby bohemian whom those servants’ employer, a rich alcoholic called Hirst, has picked up and woozily welcomed into his London mansion.

This time, the intruder is played by David Bradley, who has borrowed his nose from a falcon, his voice from a crow and his long, lank hair from Dickens’s Fagin. He observes both Michael Gambon’s Hirst and the posh drawing room that’s packed with Hirst’s bottles — and in every beady, beaky inch he’s the predatory opportunist with territorial ambitions. What ensues might be a mix of Pinter’s Caretaker, in which a tramp tries to annex an attic, and his Old Times, where a woman’s husband and her best friend swap increasingly intimate memories of her in a battle for her emotional allegiance.

Here, Spooner enters into Hirst’s own memories and fantasies, sometimes tauntingly, sometimes obsequiously, but always cunningly, always with acquisition in mind. It’s odd, original, fascinating stuff. It also provides rich pickings for its four actors. Bradley is superb. So are a dreamy, vulnerable Walliams and a hard, brutish Dunning, their body language emphasising that their bond is homoerotic going on sadomasochistic. And so, despite a self-consciously comic gesture or two, is Gambon. At first he stumbles, lurches, walks like a blind man feeling his way through a forest, and crawls out on all fours; but he’s at his finest when his big, red, crumpled face is simply staring haplessly, hopelessly into what, we realise, is the long-lost past in which he’s terminally trapped.

But then they’re all trapped, as a final tableau suggests. There they are, stuck with their memories, hopes, insecurities and illusions. It’s like watching four failed explorers marooned in Antarctica.

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