Katharine James
posted 23 March 2007

The Caretaker was Harold Pinter's first commercial stage success. It remains one of his best-loved works. Jamie Lloyd's production is slick, funny and a great showcase for some superb acting. Ultimately though, it's not nasty enough.

Aston (Con O'Neill) lives in a house he is supposed to be doing up for his brother. One night he brings home a tramp, Davies (David Bradley), from a café and offers him a bed. This is the night The Caretaker begins. The arrival of Aston's shadowy brother Mick (Nigel Harman) at the end of the act introduces Pinter's hallmark tones of menace. From hereon in, Davies encroaches on Aston's space under the manipulative influence of the quasi-pathological Mick, and is ultimately ejected back onto the streets he came from. The bottom line is that three's a crowd, blood is thicker than water and there is no room at the inn for a stinking tramp with no references to recommend him. Mick sees to it that Aston realises this.

This production begins with some jaunty-but-spooky string music that sets the tone for the evening. Then the on-stage door opens, framing Mick for a few seconds back-lit and sinister, surrounded by dry ice, like a film noir still. Oliver Fenwick's lighting design is suitably eerie. There are brief interludes between scenes where Mick appears alone on stage. Shafts of light rest on his expressionless face, underlining his malignant control of the situation.

In Aston and Davies, Pinter has created plausible psychologies, expertly rendered by David Bradley and Con O'Neill. Bradley has cornered a niche market in caretaker portrayals in recent years, appearing in all five Harry Potter films as the griping Mr Filch. His gaunt face and bandy stature, off which clothes hang with impressive shapelessness, equip him with a perfect physicality. Bradley has the impeccable comic timing which is crucial for the part and his Davies displays outrageous facility for graceless selfishness, which pays homage to Wilfred Brambell's old man Steptoe. On first impression, Con O'Neill is all solid, manly physicality. In speech, his catching, semi-unbroken voice lends him vulnerability. The highpoint in his excellent performance comes in his delivery of Aston's epic tortured monologue in which he reveals that he was for a time subjected to electric shock therapy. O'Neill really captures the levels of repressed anger and misery at his mother, at the system and his current isolation.

Objectively, Davies is unlikely to save Aston from the isolation that defines his life. This in itself is sad. What is chilling is the blackness of the game Mick sets in motion in order to destroy systematically any potential of a relationship. At the moment, this production falls down in that its successful squeezing of the text's comic juices comes at the expense of some of this darkness. Nigel Harman's Mick does not live up to the menace promised by the between-scene interludes. In presence, he is sinister. In performance he is not quite dangerous enough.

Till 14 April 2007