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Harold Pinter
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David Jones’ staging of
The Caretaker for Roundabout
culminates a 40-year career
acting and directing the work
of Harold Pinter.
Here, the director looks back.
My first experience of a Pinter play was to find myself acting in one. Officially a documentary film-maker with the BBC, I still made furtive acting appearances with London’s leading community theatre, the Tavistock Repertory. A few months earlier The Birthday Party had crashed in flames on its West End opening. Harold still keeps a framed copy of the box-office return for its one week run on the wall in the john as a wry warning against hubris. The Thursday matinee brought in two pounds six shillings (about four dollars!).
The Tavistock decided London deserved a second chance to see the play and I was asked to play the part of McCann, Goldberg’s psychotic Irish henchman. I responded immediately to the play: its mystery, its danger, its surrealist humor, its rat-trap dialogue. The experience of entering that world nightly was so spine-tingling and demanding of focus that we would happily have performed it as a daily ritual whether there was an audience there or not. Only an actor could have written this play, with its tight-rope exhilaration.
The huge bonus was that Harold came to many of the rehearsals. And when our Goldberg was away working on another piece he was in, Harold stepped into the breach. To rehearse those merciless, hilarious interrogation duets alongside their author. . . . What better way to learn the rhythms, cadences, and cheekiness that make up the Pinter music?! I try to never forget he was a poet—and still is.
THE FIRST SENSATION
In 1960 everything changed for Harold with the huge success of The Caretaker. This was the first Pinter play I saw, from the outside looking in. The television arts program I worked for, for which I was the on-screen narrator, took it up in a big way, shooting scenes from the play, and filming lengthy and lively interviews with the author. But we were only part of a general chorus of praise. The critics turned completely around, the theatrical community and audiences fell in love, the production ran for 444 performances and went on to be performed more frequently, in more countries and languages, than probably any other of his plays. The dreaded, frequently misused adjective of fame was born: “Pinteresque.” You didn’t find anyone saying Osborne-esque or Wesker-like or even Stoppard-semblable, to name a few of his celebrated contemporaries.
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David Jones
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Within four years, Pinter was to become the Royal Shakespeare Company’s most important living resident writer, and The Caretaker was selected as one of the six crucial plays of the modern repertory for the T.V. series The Present Stage, for which I was the on-screen narrator.
Forty years later, does The Caretaker still resonate? Will it have the same impact for our new millennium? I believe that the play, though written of a specific time (the late Fifties) and set in a specific place (seedy West London), has miraculously not dated. Its vibrations are universal. That’s because its three key characters and its central situation achieved and have maintained an almost mythic quality. To meet them is to have them enter your life permanently.
I have never seen The Caretaker performed since the initial production (though I saw that several times). But for 40 years, its characters, Davies, Mick, and Aston, and their encounters, their obsessions, their lonelinesses, have danced on inside my head. The junk-crammed room where they wrestle with each other both for possession and understanding still haunts me. So when I opened the text again a year ago, it was like finding family one had not visited for a while. It was also extraordinarily fresh: bright, startling, shockingly funny, and its characters portrayed with a crucial compassion for which Pinter is too seldom given credit.
AN ESSENTIAL HONESTY
Pinter has always resisted allegorical interpretations of his work. Terence Rattigan, an enthusiast (as was Noel Coward), suggested that the play was about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. “Actually,” Harold said, “It’s a play about two brothers and an old tramp who tries to move in with them.”
But what archetypes those characters are! Davies, the tramp, the homeless man, carries with him overtones of Ishmael, the Wandering Jew, the “Gentlemen of the Road” throughout history. He’s seeking shelter but always suspicious of it when offered, forced to keep traveling but never to find the safe security of Sidcup. Mendacious, dirty, foul-mouthed but with an energy for survival that burns up the stage,
“At the center of much of Pinter’s work there is a private space, safe, comfortable; and then the threat of its invasion by a stranger.”
Aston can be seen as the Holy Innocent. Victim of the world’s cruelty to outsiders, he responds with a calmness and generosity that belies his apparent simple-mindedness. His essential honesty often gives him the advantage over the cunning and marauding instincts of the two other characters. And Mick is the con-artist, the Eternal Wide-Boy: fast-talking, fast-moving, always needing to be one-up in every conversation. He’s witty but lethal when he moves in on the attack. He’s not just a smart-ass, either, but someone pained and troubled by the relationship with his damaged brother. It’s a character Pinter will revisit in different modes with Lenny in The Homecoming and Foster in No Man’s Land.
SPACE INVADERS
At the center of much of Pinter’s work there is a private space, safe, comfortable; and then the threat of its invasion by a stranger. His drama is based on that perpetual insecurity, sometimes terrifying, sometimes farcical. That space is usually a room, often with overtones of a cave or a womb. Most dangerously, the space can be the inside of a character’s mind. In The Hothouse and The Birthday Party minds are tampered with, and in The Caretaker Aston’s has been attacked before the play begins. Harold’s very first play was significantly titled The Room and Riley, the blind black man from the basement is the first of many intruders (Goldberg and McCann, Davies, Ruth in The Homecoming, Anna in Old Times, Spooner in No Man’s Land) who shatter the calm of the domestic scenes they enter. Not that the invaders always win. The dramatic thrill is in the battle for territory and the constant maneuvering to preserve ownership and privacy.
Who is the Caretaker here? In literal terms, Davies is offered that job by both Aston and Mick. But in fact Mick, however inarticulately, is taking care of Aston. Aston is taking care of Davies. And Davies, the odd man out, is taking care of himself. All three characters have to “take care” as they negotiate the precariously thin ice that connects their triangular relationship.
I hope I’ve been a reliable caretaker myself with the work of Harold’s I’ve directed over the past 20 years. And there’s certainly been no thin ice: Harold is the warmest and most enthusiastic of collaborators; and most importantly, he trusts you to get it right. I’ve had the good fortune to handle three thrilling screenplays (Langrishe, Go Down, Betrayal, and The Trial), three major theater revivals (Old Times, No Man’s Land, and The Hothouse), and I’ve directed Harold three times as an actor in his own work.
Harold Pinter
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When Harold Pinter acts, we always have a third presence with us in the rehearsal room. When I first directed the playwright in his own work, I told him, “That’s a very interesting take on that scene, Harold, but I’m not sure it’s quite what the young playwright originally had in mind.” “You don’t think he’d like what I’m doing?” “I think you might consider the pace a little. We know Pinter pauses can be boring, but he did write four on this one page. Perhaps we should examine what they meant to him.” “So you think he’d like me to take a fresh look?” “I think he’d appreciate it. I mean, that’s what rehearsals are for, exploring all the possibilities.”
Then Harold would soon be saying “You know that gesture here. Do you think our playwright would find it a bit obvious, possibly vulgar? “Well, I don’t see any gesture in the script and he’s usually pretty precise about physical detail. I think he’d feel you could do without it.” We found it a great way to communicate, even though it put Liv Ullmann into convulsions of laughter when we all rehearsed Old Times together before its American tour!
MISCHIEF & MENACE
Communication—its subtleties, its evasions, and its fear of giving away too much—is the heartbeat of Harold’s universe. Early in Pinter’s career, a misguided critic chose to baptize his work as “The Theater of Non-Communication.” Harold was quick to point out that his characters (and people in general) were all too able to communicate, but that communication was frightening, too dangerous in its risk of exposing vulnerabilities. So every conversation becomes a poker game, an evasion—anything to avoid an admission, a confession, or even a fact that could be used against you.
But these flights of evasion often have the most hilarious exuberance to them. I believe Harold is a great comic writer, a great satirist as well as a man who has earned the right to appropriate Eliot’s line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
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.”
David Jones has worked extensively in theatre, film, and television throughout his career. Recent productions include Richard Nelson's Misha's Party at the R.S.C.; No Man's Land (with Jason Robards and Christopher Plummer) at the Roundabout; The Hothouse (starring Harold Pinter) in London's West End; and Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides (with Ed Harris and Daniel Massey) on Broadway. His films include Pinter’s Betrayal, 84 Charing Cross Road, and Kafka's The Trial (starring Kyle MacLachlan in a screenplay by Pinter).
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