The Caretaker is a play in three acts by Harold Pinter. Although it was the sixth of his major works for stage and television, this psychological study of the confluence of major works for stage and television, this psychological study of the confluence of power, allegiance, innocence, and corruption among two brothers and a tramp, became Pinter’s first significant commercial success.[1 It premiered at the Arts Theater Club in London’s West End on 27 April 1960 and transferred to the Duchess Theater the following month, where it ran for 444 performances before departing London for Broadway.[2] In 1964, a film version of the play based on Pinter’s unpublished screenplay was directed by Clive Donner. The movie starred Alan Bates as Mick and Donald Pleasence as Davies in their original stage roles, while Robert Shaw replaced Peter Woodthorpe as Aston. First published by both Encore Publishing and Eyre Methuen in 1960, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter’s most celebrated and often performed plays.
According to Pinter’s biographer, Michael Billington, the playwright frequently discussed details about the The Caretaker’s origins in relation to images from his own life. Billington notes in his authorized biography that Pinter claims to have written the play while he and his first wife Vivien Merchant were living in Chiswick: [The flat was] a very clean couple of rooms with a bath and kitchen. There was a chap who owned the house: a builder, in fact, like Mick who had his own van and whom I hardly ever saw. The only image of him was of this swift mover up and down the stairs and of his van going . . . Vroom . . . as he arrived and departed. His brother lived in the house. He was a handyman . . . he managed rather more successfully than Aston, but he was very introverted, very secretive, had been in a mental home some years before and had had some kind of electrical shock treatment . . . ECT, I think . . . Anyway, he did bring a tramp back one night. I call him a tramp, but he was just a homeless old man who stayed three or four weeks.
According to Billington, Pinter described Mick as the most purely invented character of the three. For the tramp [Davies], however, he felt a certain kinship, writing “[The Pinters’ life in Chiswick] was a very threadbare existence . . . very . . . I was totally out of work. So I was very close to this old derelict’s world, in a way.”(Harold Pinter 114–17). For earlier critics, like Martin Esslin, The Caretaker suggests aspects of the Theatre of the Absurd, described by Esslin in his eponymous book coining that term first published in 1961; according to Esslin, absurdist drama by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Edward Albee, and others was prominent in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a reaction to chaos witnessed in World War II and the state of the world after the war.
Billington observes that “The idea that [Davies] can affirm his identity and recover his papers by journeying to Sidcup is perhaps the greatest delusion of all, although one with its source in reality”; as “Pinter’s old Hackney friend Morris Wernick recalls, ‘It is undoubtedly true that Harold, with a writer’s ear, picked up words and phrases from each of us. He also picked up locales. The Sidcup in The Caretaker comes from the fact that the Royal Artillery HQ was there when I was a National Serviceman and its almost mythical quality as the fount of all permission and record was a source.’ To English ears,” Billington continues, “Sidcup has faintly comic overtones of suburban respectability. For Davies it is a Kentish Eldorado: the place that can solve all the problems about his unresolved identity and uncertain past, present and future” (122).
About directing a production of The Caretaker at the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2003, David Jones observed: The trap with Harold’s work, for performers and audiences, is to approach it too earnestly or portentously. I have always tried to interpret his plays with as much humor and humanity as possible. There is always mischief lurking in the darkest corners. The world of The Caretaker is a bleak one, its characters damaged and lonely. But they are all going to survive. And in their dance to that end they show a frenetic vitality and a wry sense of the ridiculous that balance heartache and laughter. Funny, but not too funny. As Pinter wrote, back in 1960 : “As far as I am concerned The Caretaker IS funny, up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be funny, and it is because of that
point that I wrote it.”
Pinter’s own comment on the source of three of his major plays is frequently quoted by critics: I went into a room and saw one person standing up and one person sitting down, and few weeks later I wrote The Room. I went into another room and saw two people sitting down, and a few years later I wrote The Birthday Party. I looked through a door into a third room and saw two people standing up and I wrote The Caretake
When he was younger he was given electric shock therapy that leaves him permanently brain damaged. His efforts to appease the ever-complaining Davies may be seen as an attempt to reach out to others. He desperately seeks a connection in the wrong place and with the wrong people. His main obstacle is his inability to communicate. He is misunderstood by his closest relative, his brother, and thus is completely isolated in his existence. His good-natured attitude makes him vulnerable to exploitation. His dialogue is sparse and often a direct response to something Mick or Davies has said. Aston has dreams of building a shed. The shed to him may represent all the things his life lacks: accomplishment and structure. The shed represents hope for the future.
Davies manufactures the story of his life, lying or sidestepping some details to avoid telling the whole truth about himself. A non-sequitur. He adjusts aspects of the story of his life according to the people he is trying to impress, influence, or manipulate. As Billington points out, “When Mick suggests that Davies might have been in the services — and even the colonies, Davies retorts: ‘I was over there. I was one of the first over there.’ He defines himself according to momentary imperatives and other people’s suggestions” (122).
At times violent and ill-tempered, Mick is ambitious. He talks above Davies’ ability to comprehend him. His increasing dissatisfaction with Davies leads to a rapprochement with his brother, Aston; though he appears to have distanced himself from Aston prior to the opening of the play, by the end, they exchange a few words and a faint smile. Early in the play, when he first encounters him, Mick attacks Davies, taking him for an intruder in his brother Aston’s abode: an attic room of a run-down house which Mick looks after and in which he enables his brother to live. At first, he is aggressive toward Davies. Later, it may be that by suggesting that Davies could be “caretaker” of both his house and his brother, Mick is attempting to shift responsibility from himself onto Davies, who hardly seems a viable candidate for such tasks. The disparities between the loftiness of Mick’s “dreams” and needs for immediate results and the mundane realities of Davies’s neediness and shifty non-committal nature creates much of the absurdity of the play.
The Caretaker is a drama of mixed modes; both tragic and comic, it is a tragicomedy.[4]
[3] Elements of comedy appear in the monologues of Davies and Mick, and the
characters’ interactions at times even approach farce.[3] For instance, the first scene of Act Two, which critics have compared to the hat and shoe sequences in Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot, is particularly farcical:
ASTON offers the bag to DAVIES.
MICK grabs it.
ASTON takes it.
MICK grabs it.
DAVIES reaches for it.
ASTON takes it.
MICK reaches for it.
ASTON gives it to DAVIES.
MICK grabs it. Pause. (39)
Davies’ confusion, repetitions, and attempts to deceive both brothers and to play each one off against the other are also farcical. Davies has pretended to be someone else and using an assumed name, “Bernard Jenkins”. But, in response to separate inquiries by Aston and Mick, it appears that Davies’ real name is not really “Bernard Jenkins” but that it is “Mac Davies” (as Pinter designates him “Davies” throughout) and that he is actually Welsh and not English, a fact that he is attempting to conceal throughout the play and that motivates him to “get down to Sidcup”, the past location of a British Army Records Office, to get his identity “papers” (13–16).
The elements of tragedy occur in Aston’s climactic monologue about his shock treatments in “that place” and at the end of the play, though the ending is still somewhat ambiguous: at the very end, it appears that the brothers are turning Davies, an old homeless man, out of what may be his last chance for shelter, mainly because of his (and their) inabilities to adjust socially to one another, or their respective “anti-social” qualities
By: T.Titus Nyakudyara
Twitter: @NyakudyaraTitus
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