Ian McDiarmid as Davies
The Caretaker
Chichester Festival Theatre
June 2024
Photo by Ellie Kurttz
The Caretaker – Footnotes
The Footnotes to our episode on Harold Pinter’s breakthrough play, The Caretaker, include notes on the source for the character of Aston, the use of language as a means of evasion and negotiation, and the significance of Aston’s statue of Buddha.
Not listened to the episode yet? You’ll find it here.
The source of the character of Aston
We talked during the podcast about the original inspiration for the play in Pinter’s own life, with my guest, Justin Audibert, describing the neighbours that the playwright and his wife shared a house with in West London at the time that he wrote the play. In Pinter’s own account the house was owned by a builder who like “Mick had his own van”, and whose brother, named Austin, lived in the house. Pinter describes Austin as “very introverted, very secretive” and more particularly that “he had been in a mental home some years before and had had some kind of electrical shock treatment.” This is clearly a source for Aston’s shock therapy in the play, although the details of his description of the treatment in his poignant monologue are perhaps all the more telling because of another incident in Pinter’s own experience.
He related that some years previously he had answered an ad to be a guinea pig in an experiment at the Maudsley hospital in London, in order to earn a bit of money. In the experiment they attached electrodes and earphones to Pinter’s head, through which they suddenly produced a shockingly loud noise, the intent of which was to test his responses. This procedure was in no way seriously invasive, but the experience left a strong impression on him, including the sense of helplessness that Pinter felt as a guinea pig in the hands of the doctors, a feeling that informs Aston’s fear and bewilderment in his brutal treatment. Pinter’s experience at the Maudsley was also a source for the psychological research centre that is the setting for his earlier play, The Hothouse, which he wrote in 1958 but which was not publicly produced until many years later in 1980.
As a further footnote on the origin of Aston, Pinter later revealed that he had been reticent to acknowledge the real-life source of the character because his wife, Vivien Merchant, had been very unhappy about the way that he’d written about this real person. She believed that he had betrayed him in some way, to which Pinter said in defence, “How could I betray him because I’m on his side? I like him very much. I feel very sympathetic to him.” There is no doubt that we also have a great sympathy for Aston.
Alan Bates as Mick and Robert Shaw as Aston
The Caretaker film, 1963
Language as a means of evasion or negotiation
We talked a lot in the podcast about how the language of the dialogue in the play is often elliptical or even somewhat absurd in the mouths of these seemingly ordinary characters. What is literally being said is not what the characters are really seeking to convey. Their choice of indirect language is employed as form of evasion or negotiation in the back-and-forth battles for dominance between each other. In his analysis of the play in his biography of Pinter, Michael Billington, offers an example, where when Aston asks Davies where he was born, Davies’s response is “What do you mean?”. His reply is buying him time to try to evaluate why Aston is asking him, and how he can answer in a way that may strengthen his relative and tenuous position as the incomer in the house. Davies is repeatedly evasive in response to questions, because to admit the truth the truth of his life would undermine his negotiating position.
Davies’s sophistic reaction to Aston’s offering him new shoes is a vivid example of the power game that is being played out. His rejecting a perfectly good pair of shoes when he is so clearly in need of them, represents his desperate need to assert himself in some way in the unfavourable balance of power between him and Aston. The irrationality of his stubborn position is highlighted even more when in the second attempt to provide him with useful shoes, Davies rejects them because of the colour of the laces. The shoes become again a poignant symbol of the psychological dynamic between him and Aston in Davies’s pathetic final acknowledgment to Aston that the shoes are actually “working out all right”. His appeasement comes too late.
As the director, Peter Hall, said of Pinter’s use of language as a weapon in the instinctive hostilities between people, his characters “fight duels not with swords, but with words and silences.” In reply to Davies’s desperate pleas at the end of the play, Aston’s silence has the last word.
Aston’s statue of the Buddha
The opening stage directions describing the room in the play include reference to a statue of Buddha sitting on the gas stove. The statue stands out from the rest of the junk in the room, as a object of art and spirituality. It is also specifically referred to in the dialogue and action of the play. What does the choice of this particular image signify?
When Davies asks Aston what the statue is, Aston replies that he picked it up in a shop; that he was attracted to it because it “looked quite nice”, and he is happy to have it now because it is “well made”, a fact that he particularly appreciates as someone who wants to create something with his hands. I think that Aston’s association with the statue also points us toward his own compassion and kindness, in taking Davies in for example. It may also evoke Aston’s calmness, albeit perhaps poignantly, in that his calmness is not happily peaceful, but is a restless numbness that comes from his shock treatment. As a piece of art the Buddha statue suggests both his sensitivity and his fragility, a point underlined by Mick’s smashing the statue.
Which raises the question, why does Mick break what he must know Aston cherishes? It is an explosive act of painful frustration. Frustration at the reality of his position. As he hurls the Buddha against the stove he rages passionately about his own worries and pressures: “Anyone would think this house was all I got to worry about. I got plenty of other things I can worry about. I’ve got other things. I’ve got plenty of other interests. I’ve got my own business to build up, haven’t I?….I’ve got to think about the future. I’m not worried about this house. I’m not interested. My brother can worry about it…”.
This disavowal feels very much the opposite of what he says. It is a deflection, because in fact his most profound worry is really about his brother, and his breaking of the Buddha is an expression of pain and frustration at the truth – that his brother is never going to fix the house up. That he is never going to get any better. That he can’t help him.
Photo: Gail Foster
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Published 24th August
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
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