Hearing
that Timothy Spall was appearing on
stage after a lapse of 19 years was all I needed to book tickets to see Matthew Warchus’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. And then it was announced that Daniel Mays was also in the cast ….. a
double bonus.
The Caretaker was Harold
Pinter’s first play to garner substantial commercial success. Written in 1960, it centres on an extremely
shabby room crammed to the gunnels with miscellaneous objects; in fact
everything including a kitchen sink! It
is into this scruffy, less than clean space that an equally scruffy, nay dirty
tramp is taken by Aston, a troubled and damaged young man. Aston has offered the tramp, Davies, alias
Jenkins (a little confusing!) a place to stay until he straightens himself
out. This straightening out requires,
amongst other things, a decent pair of shoes and a trip to Sidcup to collect
his identity records, Davies insisting that the latter cannot possibly occur
without the former. On his uppers Davies
might be but he insistently knows what he wants and from the point of view of a
lodger, especially a non-paying one, comes up very wanting, especially as his
sleeping habits entail much loud groaning.
Unbeknownst to Davies, the room and the remaining unseen boarded up
rooms, belong to Mick, a coiled up spring of a man, with the verbal dexterity
of a semi-automatic rifle, totally at odds with his slow, gentle younger
brother, Aston.
So there
we have it, three very different men, a room and a sense that anything could
happen, probably bad, but in fact nothing does.
But this is Pinter, so the long running time is hardly noticeable,
transfixed as we are by the writing as well as the strong performances.
There has
been much written by critics about Timothy
Spall’s take on Davies, a too high percentage of it less than
complimentary. As we know, plays are
open for interpretation, which is what makes the theatre such a wonderful form
of entertainment. No two directors
approach a play in the same way, making comparisons with other productions,
whilst interesting, not terribly important.
Many of the criticisms with this version are focused on just that;
comparisons with Spall’s interpretation and others who have been more sinister.
Thankfully I’m unable to do that because this is the first version of Pinter’s
wonderful play that I have witnessed.
All I can say is that Mr. Spall, as with all his performances, makes
Davies his own. If he isn’t as menacing
as previous portrayals, so be it, for he is
immensely entertaining and believable in his own, larger than life way. And the unhinging uncertainty about what
might happen to anyone of the three characters is here; it’s in the writing.
Timothy Spall’s Davies resembles a gargoyle, all sticky
out hair, sticky out teeth, a rat of a man, with his eye on the main
chance. He wheedles, repeats himself
continually, lies, irritates and enthralls and, yes, is often very funny.
George MacKay as Mick in his tightest of tight leather jacket, initially
menaces Davies, delivering his long speeches with lightning speed, rendering
the tramp in a state of utter bewilderment. But there is one thing of which Davies is aware. This brother is completely unpredictable.
By
contrast, the always brilliant Daniel
Mays, plays Aston with a quiet intensity, his malleable face registering
everything his character is unable to voice.
The silence that accompanies his monologue about what happened to him
when committed to a mental hospital and forcibly subjected to ECT is as if
everyone is holding their breath. It is
a show stopping moment.