The Caretaker

The amazing thing is he writes for television. Admittedly the BBC, but nevertheless television. It hasn't harmed Harold Pinter. The techniques he uses in TV plays--single sets, detailed direction in the text, careful use of props a camera can highlight, dialogue better suited to facial expression and subtle bodily movement than to sweeping action--have carried over into his longer plays like The Caretaker to produce a fascinating televisionary theatre.

These techniques particularly suit plays, like The Caretaker, treating the incapacity for action. Nothing really happens in the play. An aged derelict, a beggar who preserves the fiction of being a choosier, is taken in by a young man trying to fix up an apartment building owned by his brother.

Pinter explores how the petty ambitions of each are thwarted by the fumbled intentions of the others. Davies, the old man, wants to walk across London to pick up the papers he left with a friend . . . twenty years before. Aston, the older brother and a former mental patient, wants to build a tool shed. Mick wants to make the building into handsome, profitable flats. None of the three succeed. The old man doesn't get along and is turned out.

With no concrete "action" in the play it was crucial for director Dan Freudenberger and his actors to emphasize character and establish distinct, consistent styles for each role. They did so brilliantly. Each actor had a characteristic walk, and vocal tone. Even the set of their mouths was distinctive. I. Mackenzie Lamb as Davies rasped out his lines with twitching lips and lolling tongue. Aston, played by Tom Jones, moved his lips, slowly, evenly, methodically, biting and clenching them only in his hypnotic description of an electric shock treatment. James Shuman as Mick would harass Davies, using an exaggerated enunciation, flaring his nostrils and then subsiding to a pursuing of his lips, half quizzical, half sneering.

Lamb and Jones were physically perfect for their roles. Lamb, with a forehead dripping stringy hair, a mouth missing front teeth and surrounded by a grizzled chin, moved across stage with shambling feet and hands that shared time twitching and scratching. The hulking Jones mastered the vacant grin and the dead, controlled stare of a man who ever since the doctors removed the "pincers" from his skull "couldn't look to the right or the left . . . just straight ahead."

Shuman was a bit too slight for the brash young contractor he portrayed. his acting was more strained than the others'. He became too agitated in some of Mick's speeches which should be played with a biting, deadpan humor. But his carriage was properly deadpan--a slump-shouldered, flat-footed walk. And most essential, he captured Mick's love for his brother, reflected in the abrupt concerned, slowing down of his speech whenever the bewildered Davies took one of the younger brother's fanciful harangues as an attack on Aster.

Freudenberger designed his own set and lighting. By opening the supposedly cluttered, cooped room into a wide, multiwalled affair, he made on deviation from Pinter's detailed textual description of the room. Since most of the business hovered near the walls, the actors had to make some agonizingly awkward walks across an eternity of space at crucial moments.

Freudenberger did carefully control and define his characters, however, and that was the key to this superb production of a powerful play. It makes you believe in the Experimental Theatre, and in television.