No Man's Land, Duke of York, London

Dublin's Gate Theatre is not an institution that does things by halves. It has twice honoured Harold Pinter with massive retrospective festivals, curated by its artistic chief Michael Colgan, that have played in Dublin, London and New York. And it is planning a third to mark Pinter's 80th birthday in 2010. Meanwhile, it weighs in again now with this excellent revival of the dramatist's 1974 play No Man's Land, which has just transferred to London's West End. Directed with precision and an intuitive feel for its outrageous comedy and disturbing psychological power by the man of the moment, Rupert Goold, this cast-to-the-hilt production is funny, sinister, and weirdly moving.

In broad outline, No Man's Land could be made to sound like a re-tread of the earlier classic, The Caretaker. Once again, a stranger, invited into a living space, opportunistically tries to settle himself there on a permanent basis by sowing dissension among the occupants, only to be stymied by the powers of the status quo ante. Instead of a tramp, the interloper is Spooner, the failed, down-at-heel poet whom Hirst, the grand man of letters, has picked up in a Hampstead pub. But, as this production suggests with a comic eeriness and pervasive poetry, the later play is much more subjective and dream-like, almost as if the participants – Spooner, Hirst, and the latter's jumped-up thuggish minders, Foster and Briggs – were warring aspects of a single psychic economy.

The curtain swishes back to the sound of moaning wind that could be emanating from the "no man's land" that never changes and "remains forever, icy and silent". It discloses a scene where it's not just a drinks cabinet in Hirst's drawing room but a huge dominant bar that seems to be the whole raison d'être of the place. Among the exotic furnishing, there's a medieval drinking horn next to a knight's helmet – objets d'art not inappropriate for a man who, in Michael Gambon's superb performance, is clearly a major piss-artist on the verge of a terrible crack-up. To disguise the DTs, he has to use two hands to steady the glass of whisky he proffers to Spooner, while fighting the absurd gravity (so to speak) of his predicament to remain upright.

David Bradley is a wonderfully seedy and Prufrockian Spooner. There's a delicious moment when, after attempting to exude worldly authority about champagne at breakfast, he sneaks a triangle of toast into his inside pocket for later. He and Gambon form a gruesomely funny double act, catching just the right quality of blusteringly lofty improvisation as the two strangers concoct bogus joint reminiscences in the hope of wrong-footing one another.

Gambon is hilarious when he positively jogs into the room the next morning, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and raring to undermine Spooner on the false memory front. But I've also never seen Hirst's terror of loneliness and wasted life more harrowingly communicated. Groping towards the windows with one hand, Gambon shields his eyes with the other, as though dreading to see what he is drawn to look at.

Making the switch from Little Britain to Little England with élan, David Walliams is all lethal, flirty insinuation as Foster, the "vagabond cock" sex-tourist who has been called home to look after Hirst and he discomfits Spooner with an instant fake familiarity. Nick Dunning brings a dreadful minatory mateyness to the role of Briggs and the two actors heighten a sense of the tensions within the Hirst household that Spooner vainly seeks to exploit. By the end, you get the impression not so much that a turning point has been negotiated as that the stalemate of mutual dependency has reached crisis point.

The first-night performance got a big laugh on the line about the financial adviser who was expected to visit and indeed phoned through his order for breakfast and then rang to cancel the appointment – "he said he found himself without warning in the middle of a vast aboriginal financial calamity". As the production richly demonstrates, though, the power of this profoundly probing play does not depend upon the merely topical. It reminds you, rather, of Spooner's implication that a true poet should be interested in what is "eternally present and active".

To 3 January (0871 733 1000)