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The couple sitting beside me left at the interval. I heard a woman behind me, making an apology: “I had no idea. I hadn’t seen any of his plays before.”
Some people just can’t handle Pinter.
Which is why staging his play The Caretaker (surely one of theatre-going’s most awkward audience experiences) is ballsy — especially considering the last two plays The Gate staged were Pride & Prejudice and Wuthering Heights: crowdpleasing cash-cows.
This brilliant but troubling play begins one night when Aston, a slow and delicate man in his early thirties, brings an elderly hobo called Davies back to an upstairs room of the big dilapidated house where he lives alone. Aston co-owns this house with Mick, his truculent younger brother. Mick’s a frequent visitor during the play. Davies stays the night and thenceforth never leaves. He spends much of the time negotiating with the brothers his position as caretaker.
Most of the talk in this play is about taking-care: renovating the room and the rest of the house. The brothers have grand ideas; Aston mumbles about building a shed in the garden and Mick blusters about turning the place into a penthouse. “It wouldn’t be a flat, it’d be a palace!” Mick exclaims. But all they do is talk; and the more they talk the more apparent it is that nothing will happen.
The characters talk about a bright future but struggle to articulate a past that is clearly painful. They disclose it disjointedly: shouting out in their sleep, smashing furniture, refusing to give up their mother’s old bed. These are characters who seem stupefied by memory. The random clutter that litters the room is perhaps the best visual metaphor. Just as Aston and Mick can’t bring themselves to clear out the old junk and renovate, neither can they bring themselves to clear out the past and renovate their broken lives.
In this play the characters are as vague, weird, and unfathomable as other people often seem in life. The Gate’s cast, Michael Feast (Davies), Garrett Lombard (Mick), and Marty Rea (Aston), is superb at interrupting, not finishing sentences, walking off, stuttering, sputtering into silence. The silences. They’re what the audience finds most troublesome. This is a play that ends with Davies staring at the audience, stammering out gabble until he falls quiet. Within the stillness of that quiet, the audience is most cringingly self-aware: hearing its own embarrassed rustling, fidgeting, shifting about.
Those who can’t brook a performance of The Caretaker can’t brook how awkward it is to be human.
The Caretaker runs at The Gate Theatre until March 21.
