The Caretaker

Published Wednesday 18 October 2006 at 16:40 by John Highfield

So little actually happens in Pinter’s classic study of pointless power play that you could almost ask yourself why it has remained so famous for the better part of half a century.

But out of a jumble of broken lives lived amid a heap of useless junk emerges a funny, disturbing study of the way in which people play games with each others’ minds.

Jamie Lloyd’s production captures perfectly the atmosphere of decay and corruption that seeps through a tatty West End flat - an excellent design by Soutra Gilmour - as vagrant Davies eases his way into the lives of two brothers who share an uneasy co-existance in the wintry gloom.

It’s a revival that makes the most of the rich seam of pitch black humour but is unafraid to descend into the darkness of the brothers’ mental problems.

David Bradley is a marvellous Davies, a blatant impostor whose flashes of fastidiousness and an unnerving ingratiating tone make even his more blatant distortions seem almost convincing.

Con O’Neill’s Aston is a tense, unhappy, deeply disturbed loner, existing entirely in his own world, allowing only glimpses of the personal tragedy that has shaped his life, his voice suggesting a dangerous repression.

Nigel Harman’s Mick provides a sort of light in contrast to that darkness but it is a dangerous light, a fascinating blend of the camp and the sinister that presents Pinter’s dialogue with all the flourish and gusto of a vintage music hall routine.

The fascination of the piece lies still in trying to work out where the balance of power lies as all three men make their claim for dominance and cling to the wreckage of hopeless ambitions.

And as you look at all that physical clutter and mental despair you begin to realise that The Caretaker, first performed in 1960, was surely the inspiration for Galton and Simpson’s much more mainstream but similarly unsettling Steptoe and Son, which followed just a year later.