“The Caretaker” at Chichester Minerva, classically played

The new Chichester Minerva production of “The Caretaker”, Harold Pinter’s 1960 classic, here directed by Justin Audibert, perfectly shows why this play is indeed a classic. On the one hand, we’re in a real London world of people near the bottom of society. On the other hand,these realistic elements keep tipping over into the surreal, into the absurd, into the unknowable.

As designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis, the space onstage is a single attic room, its walls and ceiling peeling, its interior brimming with ageing bric-a-brac. A bucket hanging from the ceiling is there to collect water from a leak. The three characters, all male - Davies, Aston, Mick - and this room are close to people and places in the novels of Charles Dickens. And Davies, the tramp whom Aston kindly invites to stay in his room, regularly voices resentment of Blacks, foreigners, and immigrants in ways only too reminiscent of today; he also talks London bus routes like a bore in an Alan Ayckbourn comedy. He keeps saying he must collect his papers from Sidcup: this repetition is like Chekhov’s three sisters with their plans to go to Moscow.

Sometimes the play’s absurdism is merely domestic. (Davies: “I keep myself up. That’s why I left my wife. Fortnight after I married her, no, not so much as that, no more than a week, I took the lid off a saucepan, you know what was in it? A pile of her underclothing, unwashed. The pan for vegetables, it was. The vegetable pan. That’s when I left her and I haven’t seen her since.”) Davies, the play’s main talker, is shockingly, insistently, casually racist; but what he objects to in “the Blacks” (also in Poles and Greeks) is simply that  they are unknown. He’s full of apprehensions about the world; one of his phobias is the idea of sharing a toilet with “the Blacks”. Yet he too is an unknown. When Aston asks him if he is Welsh, he’s evasive. (Pause: Davies: “Well, I’ve been around, you know…. what I mean —- I been about….”) And he’s more evasive when Aston asks where he was born. “I was … uh…. oh, it’s a bit hard, like, to set your mind back… see what I mean…. Going back… a good way… lost a bit of track, like…. you know….”

Aston, the kindest and most patient of the play’s three characters, ends Act Two with a long soliloquy that opens his thoughts and his most painful experience to us. His account, told without rage or hysteria, is of being institutionalised and incarcerated, of having some kind of brain surgery that has damaged and slowed him. We have no notion whether he is telling the objective truth, but there’s no doubt that this is his truth (whereas Davies keeps revising aspects of his past and whereas Mick, Aston’s crafty younger brother, is a master of teasing deceptiveness). And whereas Davies shows no signs of going to Sidcup, Aston does get some things done: he fixes a plug, and before the play’s last act he has fixed the leak in the roof.

But “The Caretaker” is not really about the facts of these men’s lives. Its drama lies in the power play between them. Aston is the most vulnerable, the most damaged character here, but he is open, generous, gentle, whereas Davies is ungrateful, suspicious, defensive. Mick is the freest and most dangerous character, the one who can come and go most naturally, the alarming and/or hilarious chatterbox who best exemplifies the device of the Cockney piss-take so essential to Pinter theatre; he keeps unsettling Davies by seeming to threaten him and next to encourage him.

All three actors of Audibert’s production demonstrate kinds of character acting. Jack Riddiford is the most natural in his delivery of the cheeky wheeler-dealer banter that is Mick; Adam Gillen, pitching his voice as a high tenor (think Michael Crawford in “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em”), makes Aston a caricature Londoner whose lack of guile only gradually becomes evident; Ian McDiarmid, a master actor, gives his voice all its chest and nasal resonance as he emphasises the surface shifts - alarmed, sly, aggressive, defensive - in Davies’s character. At first impression, it seems that both Gillen and McDiarmid are giving exaggerated performances - and yet they play the play with such clarity of delivery that eventually they exaggerate nothing. “The Caretaker” is all here.

This, Pinter’s sixth play, was the one that put him on the map. When it was new in 1960, and for years afterwards, he insisted that it was not a political play and that he was not a political playwright. Over the decades, however, he himself became overly political - and began to realise that his politics were all there in his earliest plays. In “The Caretaker”, Aston’s generosity about space and possessions is contrasted with Davies’s meanness and acquisitiveness , while Mick’s changes of tack make him the power broker of the three. The beauty of the Chichester production is that it is classically played: we aren’t forced to see this power struggle as a metaphor for some larger warfare. The politics (like the humour) is all there in the timing and the spacing. Every pause, every phrase, every movement registers, with dark and painful beauty.

June 20

Adam Gillen (Aston), Ian McDiarmid (Davies). Photographer: Ellie Kurtz.

Jack Riddiford (Mick), Ian McDiarmid (Davies). Photographer: Ellie Kurtz.

Adam Gillen (Aston). Photographer: Ellie Kurtz