The Caretaker

Published Monday 19 March 2007 at 11:25 by Jason Best

First seen at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre last year, Lloyd’s staging mines the humour latent in Pinter’s text. Indeed, Lloyd and his cast even give us the odd burst of almost vaudevillian clowning. The trade off is that the play’s endlessly shifting power games between Mick the spivvy landlord, his weak brother Aston, and Davies the tramp do not carry as much threat as they might.

Not that there is anything lacking in the performances. David Bradley’s impressively squalid dosser has just the right amounts of wheedling slyness and resentful belligerence the character requires. Con O’Neill’s quiet, introverted Aston is convincingly and touchingly, damaged, his voice’s soft huskiness bearing the trace of the electric-shock treatment in his past. Aston’s frail mental state is also recognisible in the half-derelict house he inhabits, here perfectly realised by Soutra Gilmour’s set with its carefully arranged piles of random, useless junk.

Nigel Harman’s Mick is a less obvious failure than the other two. Cocky and swaggering, he manages to make the odd touch of prissiness in his dress and manner a sign of strength rather than weakness. But even he is as doomed to impotence as the others.

From this angle, the lack of real menace may even make sense. We do not believe, in Lloyd’s staging, that Mick will actually erupt into violence, but we do not believe that any of the characters will act out their intentions. Davies will never get to Sidcup to retrieve the papers that prove his identity, Aston will never build his shed, nor will Mick fulfill his dreams of penthouse sophistication.