[NEohioPAL]Fine Performances in Pinter's 'Caretaker' Tony Brown/Plain Dealer Review

[James Mango]

Fine performances in Pinter's 'Caretaker' 

02/18/02

Tony Brown 
Plain Dealer Theater Critic

The revival on the world's stages of the poor,
predatory characters who inhabit the anxious little
worlds of Harold Pinter reached Cleveland this weekend
and will continue in the spring. 

On Friday, Charenton Theater Company opened a small,
funny, in-your-face but sometimes untidy version of
"The Caretaker," Pinter's 1960 apocalyptic vaudeville
sketch about two brothers who take a vagrant into
their dirty west London room. 

In April, the Cleveland Play House will open
"Betrayal," the British playwright's 1978 backward
detective story about a love triangle. 

Cleveland is catching up with a phenomenon that began
in London in the fall of 2000, when Michael Gambon
starred in "The Caretaker," followed in New York by a
Broadway production of "Betrayal" and a Pinter
Festival at Lincoln Center. 

The renewed attention is focused on a set of
elliptical plays noted for their pause-filled,
circular dialogue, their pushing of the boundaries of
naturalism and their influence on younger
contemporaries such as David Mamet, Tom Stoppard and
Sam Shepard. 

"The Caretaker" is a particularly apt place to start
such a re-examination, because it was Pinter's first
critical success when it premiered in London. Wildly
comic but menacing, the three-act play stretches a
small idea almost to its breaking point. 

Former psychiatric patient Aston (Allan Byrne in the
Charenton production), the elder but duller of the two
siblings, befriends a defiant bum named Davies (Reuben
Silver) and brings him home to a dilapidated room in
an abandoned building. 

No sooner is Aston out of the room the next morning
than Mick (Kirk Brown), Aston's younger and more
decisive brother, shows up demanding to know just who
Davies is and what he's doing there. 

Davies, who constantly says he's got to travel to
Sidcup to get his identity papers but never leaves the
room, tries to play the two brothers against each
other. He wants to become caretaker of the place,
although his qualifications for the job are hazy at
best. 

In the end, the brothers throw Davies out. 

Pinter has always insisted the play is about the
characters and situation depicted. But critics and
audiences have searched the nuances - drops of water
from a leaky roof echoing in a bucket, a vacuum
cleaner roaring away in the dark - for suggestions of
a modern expulsion from Eden. 

Whatever it is about, the play is apparently intended
to leave the viewer amused but aghast at the feckless
cruelty of the human animal. 

Although it breaks little new ground nor sheds much
new light, the Charenton production leaves the
audience with exactly that helpless but elated
feeling. 

Artistic director James Mango crowds Pinter's little
room in a corner of a former beauty parlor in an
office building at Playhouse Square. With a low
ceiling and the 45-member audience arranged on two
sides of the littered stage, claustrophobia is
palpable for most of the show's nearly three-hour
running time. 

Low-budget (clip lights suspended from false-ceiling
supports stand in for a lighting grid) and pocked by
rough scene changes and abrupt act finales, this
"Caretaker" is nonetheless notable for its fine
performances. 

Gaunt, stone-faced Byrne never moves or utters a sound
without allowing Aston to take his time to formulate
his actions, the slow-motion mental processes
flickering behind dead eyes. It's a quietly bravura
performance of great skill and control. 

Silver, one of Cleveland's bona fide acting treasures,
at first does Davies as a confused old man. But once
his character's self-serving intentions become clear,
the Buddha-plump actor imbues the impoverished geezer
with a perverse snobbery. 

The galumphing Brown grins goofily throughout the
evening, even when he's threatening Davies. This adds
an extra degree of sadism to Mick's persona and of
mystery to Pinter's central enigma. 

That enigma remains elusive in the Charenton
production. 

Perhaps it is too much to ask a theater company to
unravel this play. Perhaps it is enough to share a
chuckle and a shudder with Aston, Mick and Davies all
over again, and to draw our own conclusions. 


Contact Tony Brown at: 

tbrown at plaind.com, 216-999-4181 







__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com