The Caretaker

Harold Pinter

The Caretaker was the first of Pinter's plays to bring him artistic and commercial success as well as national
recognition. Opening on April 27, 1960, at the Arts Theatre in London, The Caretaker was an immediate hit with
audiences as well as critics, receiving mostly favourable reviews. In addition, The Caretaker received the
Evening Standard Award for best play of 1960. In the many years since its first production, the play has
continued to be the recipient of critical praise. It has been adapted for television as well as film and has seen
numerous revivals all over the world, including at least one production with an all-female cast.

The real-world origins of the play lie in Pinter's acquaintance with two brothers who lived together, one of whom
brought an old tramp to the house for a brief stay. At the time, Pinter himself had very little money and so
identified somewhat with the tramp, with whom he occasionally spoke. Artistically, The Caretaker is clearly
influenced in both style and subject matter by Samuel Beckett's 1955 classic Waiting for Godot, in which two
tramps wait endlessly for someone they know only as Godot to come and give meaning and purpose to their
lives.

Through the story of the two brothers and the tramp, The Caretaker deals with the distance between reality and
fantasy, family relationships, and the struggle for power. It also touches on the subjects of mental illness and the
plight of the indigent. Pinter uses elements of both comedy and tragedy to create a play that elicits complex
reactions in the audience. The complexity of the play, Pinter's masterful use of dialogue, and the depth and
perception shown in Pinter's themes all contribute to The Caretaker's consideration as a modern masterpiece

Act I opens in a room full of assorted objects, clearly best described as junk. These include an iron bed, paint
buckets, numerous boxes, a toaster, a statue of Buddha, a kitchen sink, and a gas stove. A bucket for catching
drips hangs from the ceiling. Mick, a man in his twenties, sits alone on the bed, slowly looking around the room,
focusing on each object in turn. When the bang of a door is heard, followed by the sound of muffled voices,
Mick leaves the room.

Aston, in his thirties, and Davies, an old tramp, enter the room. Aston tells Davies to sit and offers him a...

Act II opens a few seconds later. Mick starts questioning Davies in a hostile fashion, repeating many of the same
questions over and over again. This confuses and frightens the tramp. Davies tells Mick that he was brought to
the room by "the man who lives here,'' but Mick informs Davies that he is in fact the owner of the house and that
unless Davies wants to rent the room, Mick can take him to the police. Aston then enters with a bag, which he
says belongs to Davies, but Mick grabs the bag and keeps it from the tramp. Mick finally lets Davies have the
bag, then leaves the room. Aston...

Act III begins two weeks later. Mick and Davies are together in the room, and Davies is complaining about
Aston, who, he says, will not give him a knife for his bread and refuses to keep the Blacks next door from
coming into the house and using the lavatory. Davies says that he and Mick could "get this place going,’’ and
Mick offers a series of decorating ideas, using the words and images common in house and garden magazines—
which seem like ludicrous fantasies for the house he owns.

Mick says that the house would be a palace, and that he and his brother would live in it....
 Aston found Davies in a café and offered him lodging and money until he gets "himself sorted out." Of
course, that never will happen. Davies takes possession of Aston's place, a bleak room with twin beds, junk piled
on junk, a bare light bulb suspended from a leaky ceiling, and a paper tarp over the window. He complains about
the room in a febrile whine: he's used to much better, he's going to collect his "belongings" off in Sidcup as soon
as the weather breaks, as soon as he gets some shoes and sorts himself out, and so on. He cannot leave, though
he runs out of excuses why. Stewart's Davies moans, snivels, croaks with belligerence and the tyranny of the
weak, making himself not merely annoying but thoroughly unappealing.

Aston's brother Mick, on stage at first rise, is top man in the room's pecking order. Mick is not taken in
by Davies, who therefore is deeply fearful of him. Pinter gets these three interacting in psychological power
games, ranging in importance from slight and funny to dark and menacing. It's not plot that concerns him, but
situation; not what has happened, but what is happening.

It's not about a theme, an idea, or motif. His drama ‘is' that theme or idea. The men's jostling for
position, the put downs, the impersonal free-floating hostility, most of all the uncertainty surrounding the who,
what and why of these characters may be more important than the overall action, minimal as it is.

Davies in this regard is only marginally more important a character than the brothers. He tries and fails
to play them off one another, but in the end both reject him. If they symbolize parts of the psyche, as one critic
claimed long ago, then Davies probably represents a massive, violent id. At one point when verbally attacked, he
pulls a knife.

Mick and to a lesser extent Aston are versions of that Pinter type whose detachment and disinterest are
sources of power. Action and reaction never arouse emotional responses. Aston especially typifies Pinter's style
of dialogue in which one character repeats the other's statements flatly, insistently, wearing down resistance and
creating an atmosphere of unease. Mick might be Goldberg (The Birthday Party) or Lenny (The Homecoming),
two of Pinter's Inquisitors. Their disjointed talk is in equal part absurd, hilarious, yet heavy with larger meaning
that nonetheless remains opaque. Like his avatars, Mick grinds down Davies' ego by keeping him off base,
questioning his presence, his every word, especially his claim to own a "bag of belongings" that would establish
his identity in the world, if only the bag were not elsewhere. Mick intimidates and taunts him, withholds his
clothing, keeps him vulnerable and on edge, deliberately misunderstanding every word by shifting the
assumptions behind ordinary language.

Thus is Davies under siege. Uncertainty grows. The poor sod yearns for clarity, becomes increasingly
uncomfortable, then bewildered, then furious at the politely overbearing brothers. Yet, despite his victimization,
Davies rejects their offers of betterment. Aston tries to give him shoes, for example and Mick casually offers him
the job of caretaker of the house–perhaps to maintain his slippery control over the present, albeit on the fringe of
dilapidation. Davies prefers his independence, though he presents an image of dislocation, dispossession, and
spiritual homelessness in an orderly country.

And sure enough, Mick, in a stunning final scene, indicts the wretch in one of Pinter's typical
perorations--biting words spoken in a cool, remote tone of voice. He damns Davies as a liar, "Violent, erratic,
nothing but a wild animal," heaping insult on humiliation, flinging a half dollar at Davies' feet to pay him off for
nominal care-taking.

Nor does Aston come to Davies rescue, though he tries to revive Aston's earlier good graces. "I'd look
after the place for you...not for your bother...I'll be your man, just say the word..." But playing benefactor no
longer interests Aston. There is no reason in Pinter's world to expect continuity in human behaviour or
predictability or reliability. Aston's earlier assault of Davies recalls Goldberg's relentless interrogation of Stanley
in The Birthday Party that leads to Stanley's breaking down and hospitalization.

Aston, meanwhile, joins the ranks of Pinter characters familiar with mental wards. The longest speech
in The Caretaker is Aston's tale of hospitalization for hallucinations and catatonic behavior. In a moment when
Davies has the upper hand in their power play, he threatens Aston with return to the place with its electro-shock
and other treatments involving "pincers at the temples." Beyond these vague references to psychosis, a mass
unconscious almost surfaces in the action, especially in a mysterious moment of darkness, when Mick changes
the burned out, naked light bulb. A scuffle and a vacuum cleaner are heard before lights up on Aston, who
announces the place needed cleaning up. The symbolic double meaning of outer and inner room could not be
clearer.

Two brothers share a dilapidated house to which one sibling invites Davies, a disheveled yet strangely
fastidious old man. There ensues a battle of wills, a one-upmanship game of dominance among the old codger,
the passive but kindly Aston, and the violent, hostile Mick. That's the surface of Harold Pinter's 1960 "The
Caretaker," a piece that throws an absurdist light on its very real situation to become a drama of menace and
danger. In this Roundabout Theatre production, the menace is muted, resulting in an evening more tedious and
cold than tense and boiling.

This is a rich work about, among other things, loss of identity, the breaking (literally) of idols, truth,
conspiracy, secrets, dreams, loneliness, fathers and sons, power, sterility, and lack of communication. It's also
filled with malevolence. Davies is a threatening, opportunistic figure, a go-between who seals his own fate by
trying to play one brother against the other.

Harold Pinter writes his plays with precise requirements as to how they're to be directed and acted. He
has such a pronounced sense of what he wants done that, in his many stage directions, he differentiates between
"pause," "slight pause," "silence," and "long silence." Not even Samuel Beckett, another dramatist with a
reputation for performance strictures, is so specific. Indeed, Pinter seems to populate his works only with people
who continually pause and observe silences. When he's at his best, he convinces us that this is an accurate
depiction of human communication (or lack of communication) in the real world.

Aston's first words, spoken at the end of Act I, are "What's the game?" Well, the game seems to be
King-of-the-Squalid-Mountain; during three acts and eight scenes, the men come and go, holding conversations
that register as subtle plays for power. Davies, who's been using the assumed name Bernard Jenkins, in one of
those strangers whom dramatists like to show arriving unannounced and gradually taking over. This shambling
fellow in worn shoes shifts from being intimated by the returning Mick to laying unspoken claim to the abode.
Eventually, he's wearing a smoking jacket and sitting in a stuffed chair with a pipe held aloft.

Aston, a slow-moving man who gives the impression of being simultaneously thoughtful and
ineffectual as he talks about the shed he's going to build in the back, is ruminatively cordial to Davies. Only days
after delivering a long speech about electroshock therapy he's endured does he bring himself to ask his guest to
shove off. Mick, the building's actual owner and the most labile of the three men, gets his jollies by keeping the
others guessing whether he'll be hostile or conciliatory whenever he steals back into the room. As is typical of
Pinter, nothing is resolved when the games of one-on-one and two-on-one have played out.

The fixing, which is Aston's only job, is moving along with painful slowness: Aston has trouble settling
in to any sort of actual work. But, he assures Davies, as soon as he gets a shed erected in the backyard, he'll be
able to clear out this room and make it really comfortable.

Davies gets a somewhat different picture of things from Mick, Aston's brother, who drops by from time
to time. Mick has a job and other responsibilities, but he owns the house and he cares for his brother; bullying
Davies (perhaps in hopes of getting Davies to bully Aston), he too signs the old man on as caretaker. And the old
man is only to happy to play one brother against the other to secure his own future.

Pinter's plot, which is revealed as much between the lines as through them, cannily grabs our attention
and holds it; every scene seems to contain an unexpected explosion along with the profusion of eloquent silences
and speeches that we do expect. It's a grand story, and against the odds, too, since very little actually happens in
it—much of our information comes from inference or intuition. (The brothers' names are never actually spoken
at all.) It's also very funny; and, often, discomfiting.

A play about power, perhaps reflecting the state of the world in the late '50s, when it was written, with
old Davies representing the decaying impotence of the British Empire and Aston standing in for the alienated
impotence of the Angry Young Man. You will likely discover something else: good drama like this challenges us
to coax our own obsessions and concerns from its web of universal truths. The Caretaker is very good drama,
indeed.