"Caretaker"
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"Alan Bates has protean brilliance in the exciting
part of the now-hostile, now-witty, now-ironic double-talker
Mick."
-Theatre Arts
"A play of strangely
compelling beauty and passion. Proclaims its young author as
one of the important playwrights of our day. It will lend lustre
to
this Broadway season."
-NY Times
"Incisive theatre
with a brilliance all its own. Unique comedy-drama. Will be a
strong contender for foreign play honors this year.
-World Telegram
& Sun
"A play which
is wonderful, beautiful theatre. Fascinating, funny, touching
and excitingly imaginative. Speed your
way, I entreat you, to 'The Caretaker.'"
-The News
"Why not come right
out and say it? "The Caretaker" is probably a masterpiece.
The truest and most universal piece of theatre Broadway has had
in some time."
-Saturday
Review
Quote
"I don't know what
kind of characters my plays will have until they ... well, until
they are. Until they indicate to me what they are. I don't
conceptualize in any way. Once I've got the
clues I follow them - that's my job, really, to follow the clues."
Harold Pinter
in a 1966 interview
with Lawrence M. Bensky, first published in the Paris Review
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t
h e a t r e
The Caretaker
Bates Archive Spotlight
April 2000, 40th anniversary of the play's premiere
Robert Shaw, Donald Pleasence,
Alan Bates
First New York performance at the
Lyceum Theatre, 4 October 1960
NEW YORK CAST:
Mick: Alan Bates
Aston: Robert Shaw
Davies: Donald Pleasence
Directed by Donald McWhinnie
Setting by Brian Currah, Lighting by Paul Morrison
Theatre Arts, December 1961
by Susan M. Black
 October
4, 1961, Lyceum Theatre. THERE ARE THREE characters in "The
Caretaker" - two brothers, Aston and Mick, and a bum, Davies.
There is one set - the cluttered attic of a shabby house somewhere
in West London, owned by Mick and inhabited by Aston. One evening,
Aston saves Davies from a pub-room brawl and brings him home.
He offers him a cot for the night. As the play proceeds, he lets
him stay on, gives him money, clothes and shoes, and offers him
a job as caretaker of the house. Whenever Aston goes out, Mick
comes in. His cruel baiting of the bum is as strange as Aston's
kindness, but he also offers Davies a job as caretaker. Following
Aston's revelation the he was once subjected to shock treatment
in a mental institution, Davies turns from him. He tries to get
Mick to evict Aston from the attic. He plays one brother against
the other. Finally, Davies goes too far in his taunting of Aston.
He alienates both brothers and is ordered to leave.
 I have described all
that takes place on the stage - and very little it is - because
I think "The Caretaker" shows how much a play can leave
out and still strike us as complete. It has no plot, and thus
no denouement (the fact that Davies departs is of no more pertinence
than the fact that Godot never arrives), yet it has suspense.
The suspense lies in Mr Pinter's slow, steady revelation of the
characters.
Donald Pleasence succeeds
in the difficult task of making the whining, complaining, fastidious,
pride-and prejudice-ridden, dirty Davies more pitiable than he
is detestable; I shall never see a human or an animal scratching
again without thinking of him. Robert Shaw is a properly vague,
eerie and gentle Aston. Alan Bates has protean brilliance in
the exciting part of the now-hostile, now-witty, now-ironic double-talker
Mick. The three players have been directed by Donald McWhinnie
to convey all the laughter and tears Harold Pinter has put into
his drama. He allows them to exploit each situation, from vaudeville
stunt to sad soliloquy, and he keeps them balancing on the tightrope
of tragicomedy without a trip. |||
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"A character who can present no convincing argument
or information as to his past experience, his present behavior,
or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis
of his motives, is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as
anyone who, alarmingly, can do all these things."
Harold Pinter
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Unwrapping Mummies
Time, 13 October 1961
"The Caretaker" (by Harold Pinter) ups curtain on
a West London room that looks like the Pharoah's tomb of a junkman.
There are bales of yellowed newspaper, moldy tennis rackets,
scattered bureau drawers, a sink bowl, and a disconnected gas
stove graced with a gilt plaster Buddha. There is a lawn mower
and a blowtorch. On a rope strung from the leaky roof hangs a
paint bucket into which drops of water plunk like the  tick-tock
of doom. Into this dusty, chilly tomb, English playwright Pinter
deposits three mummies of modern man, who proceed to strip off
each other's wrappings with ripples of humor, glints of malice
and a passionate alternating current of regard and disregard
for their common humanity.
The room is the property
of two odd brothers. The elder (Robert Shaw) has been in a mental
institution, and between long silences he constructs his thoughts
with the meticulous intensity of a child building a tower of
blocks; the younger (Alan Bates) is a tradesman who only occasionally
visits the room. In a gesture of almost absent-minded Samaritanism,
the elder brother invites an old tramp to share his quarters.
This bum, memorably
played by Donald Pleasence, is the smelliest, itchiest, un-deloused
scamp ever plucked from the rim of a rubbish barrel. Every time
he opens his mouth, he picks at the scab of past wrongs and present
hates. A wily slum serf, the tramp raises a mock one-finger salute
to his masters, and plays the brothers off against each other.
They, in turn, offer him the nebulous post of caretaker, and
finally, in mutual revulsion, cast him out to an unknown fate.
|||. too intent to cough .|||
In defiance of its
spider-thin plot line, "The Caretaker" is completely
absorbing - the kind of drama that leaves playgoers too intent
to cough because they are forced to follow the play on several
levels of meaning.
Psychologically, each
of the characters is paralyzed by failures of will and nerve,
and the junk-cluttered room reflects that impasse. Yet, each
of them nurses a  delusionary
hope that if he can take a certain first step in self-therapy,
he can "get this place going," as the tramp caretaker
puts it. The elder brother believes that his salvation lies in
building a workshop in the yard, but he is finicky about using
only "good wood" and he gets to a hardware store so
belatedly that the jig saw he needs is "gone." The
tramp plans to make a trip to a nearby town for some personal
papers that will clarify his identity, yet he repeatedly puts
it off because his shoes and the weather are not quite right.
The younger brother believes that he himself will forge ahead
with big plans when his brother is cured. Locked in the cycle
of self concern, as playwright Pinter subtly emphasizes through
individual repetitive speech patterns, no one of the characters
can save himself. Each member of this weirdly disparate trio
needs the others, but the language of cooperation is not in them,
and they niggle with all-too-human stubbornness over whether
a window should be up or down. Their final tragedy is to deny
their mutual need and fall apart into isolation.
Philosophically, this
is a telling restatement of man's eternal aloneness. Politically,
it seems like a parable of humanity's pressing international
predicament. Theatrically, "The Caretaker" represents
a high order of aesthetic achievement, the kind of drama that
at play's end no longer belongs to the playwright, but to every
sentient playgoer. |||
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Mr Pleasence relentlessly builds one of the most
sordid characters in modern theater. The man Davies might appall
you, but the actor Pleasence earns your unqualified admiration.
As Aston, Robert Shaw is the opposite of the tramp...
For a wild his mildness and remoteness shelter him from Davies,
but in time he reacts - to the bum's smell, among other things.
Alan Bates is Mick, the joker, who bedevils the
tramp, who carries the brisk, quick comedy of "The Caretaker,"
and who finally lets the audience see deeper into his mind in
a moment of lucid passion. Individually and together, the three
men are brilliant.
-Norman Nadel, New York world-Telegram, 5 October
1961
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From interviews with Alexander Davion and Donald Pleasence
in "The Player, A Profile of an Art,"
by Lillian Ross and Helen Ross, Simon and Schuster, 1962
Davion: In the fall of
1961, I returned to New York, to see what I might find in the
way of a job in the theatre, and I saw a billboard outside the
Lyceum Theatre announcing that Robert Shaw, Donald Pleasence,
and Alan Bates were rehearsing in "The Caretaker."
The play was one I had read and loved. Bates was going to leave
the cast after the pre-Broadway tour plus four weeks, and I auditioned
for his part and got it. It's the best contemporary play I've
ever been in....
I started out pushing
things a bit too much. In one scene in particular, in which I
shared a sandwich with the old tramp, I was missing points; I
wasn't getting the reaction I knew I should be getting from the
audience. After a while, I relaxed a bit in the part, and the
reaction came back from the audience. I found that by doing it
naturally, playing it as simply as I could, without bravado,
I created the effect I wanted.
The lines of the play
are so good, so right; there isn't a line that is redundant.
I compare this play to a musical score. The play is all in the
text. "The Caretaker" was a tremendous exercise in
concentration. You could never let go for a moment. If one of
the three of us in the cast was off key, the whole play went
down the drain. ...I learned an incredible amount simply by working
with Donald Pleasence in this single play. Things like how to
hold a pause - just pure know-how.
Pleasence: I don't go
to people for my feelings about a part. I always go to animals
and birds. For the part of the old, suspicious tramp in "The
Caretaker," I thought of myself as an alley cat.
There was quite a
lot of comment on my performance in "The Caretaker,"
and people asked me how I managed to get a look of absolute desperation
and terror in my eyes when the old man finally realizes that
he is going to be chucked out of the house. The old man at this
point comes as near as possible to facing up to himself: he knows
it is curtains for him. That look in the eyes arose from sheer
intensity of emotion. It arose from very powerful feeling - physical
exertion, really - that left me absolutely exhausted at the end.
I think I managed to achieve something three nights out of the
week. One can come halfway to doing what one is trying to do,
providing one is willing to tear one's guts out. Sometimes the
whole thing was utterly real to me, even after I'd played it
for a year and a half. At other times, it wasn't, and then I
had to work all the harder to do it. |||
IN CELEBRATING the "Caretaker" anniversary,
Pleasence scholar Christopher Weedman and I
have divided up a wealth of material between our two web sites.
Visit these four links to explore the 1960-61 productions,
the resulting film, and the 1991 London revival:
History |||.London, 1960 ||| Film, 1964 ||| Revival, 1991
If you have not seen "The Caretaker,"
I hope you'll spend a couple of hours reading it soon.
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