The Caretaker

Written in the 1950s, premiered as the 1960s just got started, Pinter’s The Caretaker is a brilliant example of New Theatre writing. His first big hit, the play is a wild portrait of three men who are all, in different ways, damaged misfits. 

Where there are plenty of interpretations of what, 60 years later, is precisely meant by ‘a Pinter pause’, director Iain Sinclair has decided to stick closely to his author’s dramatic code. ‘We have followed it to the letter’, he says and he offers the play exactly as written. There’s even a second interval. 

The three-man cast illuminates the dark corners of this first great Pinter success and one of his most substantial works. The cluttered London attic, as here brilliantly designed by Veronique Benett, becomes the setting for a series of intense and ever-shifting relationships, comic inevitabilities and personal revelations, all magnified by the sense of menace that broods over the Pinter landscape.

There’s mentally afflicted Aston (Anthony Gooley) who offers shelter to the ragged vagrant Davies (Darren Gilshenan) who he has rescued from physical injury in a café altercation. Davies thinks his luck has changed: it looks like he’s going to be offered the caretaker’s position. But owner Mick (Henry Nixon) quickly twigs Davies’ clumsy opportunism and gives the old man (and the audience) some nasty scares.

Davies makes clumsy attempts to play the two brothers against each other, while assuring them that he’s about to travel to Sidcup to “collect his papers”. Gilshenan is quite brilliant, exploring the character’s evasiveness, sleeping in a second cold narrow bed, donning a bright red smoking jacket that Aston has found for him.

Iain Sinclair’s spare, precise direction reveals every nuance of the wit and claustrophobic terror that made Pinter a household name when this play first appeared. 

Just don’t make me stay for a second interval when one would surely do.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Prudence Upton.