FringeReview UK 2024

The Caretaker

Chichester Festival Minerva Theatre

Genre: Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Chichester Minerva Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Artistic Director Justin Audibert’s first Chichester production lights on Pinter’s breakthrough 1960 The Caretaker, revived at the Minerva Theatre till July 13^th: with Jack Riddiford as Mick, Adam Gillen’s Aston, and Ian McDiarmid’s Davies.

Though The Homecoming of 1965 is generally reckoned Pinter’s finest play, The Caretaker remains his defining one. The brilliance of Audibert’s reading is its lucidity and pace – different to the almost Chekhovian, instrumented production by Matthew Warchus in 2016.

The paradox is we see how indebted Pinter is to Beckett, in Audibert’s clean direction: a patina of retrospective Pinteresque is stripped back to reveal new confidence absorbing a still-visible influence. An eternal triangle of survival and wrong-footing takes up a classical permanence.

A cello winds round a vibraphone in Jonathan Girling’s embellished four-note composition rooted in late 1950s cool and the Modern Jazz Quartet; aided by the steely echo of Ed Clarke’s sound design. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s truly peeled-back Rachman-like interior – with additional lowered ceiling – is impressive. Bare boards with junk-iron scurf round the edges like knurled-off swarf from a lathe; indeed an obsessively-collecting mind. It’s an essay in bleak blue-greys, winter-lit by Simon Spencer with gulphs of darkness quite visible.

The original power-politics of how Aston brings home a vagrant, Davies, whose own pushiness moves both articulate, vicious brother Mick and gentle, ECT-damaged Aston against him, often erupts as a flurry of words: mainly Davies’ and Mick’s, in sly manoeuvre and defensive improvisation respectively. With Pinter we’re often lessoned in the unsaid; here the mode of saying is all.

McDiarmid’s Davies wheezes Aston backhanded thanks (donated shoes don’t fit) and sheer ingratitude in arias of self-justification. McDiarmid’s clear, Cockney-sharpened voice describes tessituras of wheedling self-pity, ambitions, self-justifying monologues. Davies says he left his wife after two weeks for boiling her underwear to prove how clean he is, despite the evidence. Snide aggression lurks beneath pleading.

The amplitude given around this doesn’t extend the world of pauses; it hardly needs to. Former Star Wars stalwart McDiarmid at 79 is sovereign in this role and makes it his own: one grasped by so many from Donald Pleasance (twice, over 30 years apart) to Michael Gambon, Jonathan Pryce, David Bradley and Timothy Spall.

McDiarmid eschews the musical arias and fluted affect of some in favour of downright vocal delivery. This Davies rouguishly nudges for advantage, shifts allegiance, remains permanently ungrateful. It’s his undoing as he – too cannily – takes stock of his luck.

Mick’s words by contrast are in Riddiford’s hands wedges of sound, manically delivered monologues on his knowledge of London, 38 bus routes, spaghetti-like topography and fillets of the A-Z. They’re spewed out in an assertion of both authority and menace which more than hints that Mick sees Davies as a waster – he’s already assaulted him. His performance is less menacing than some, more thuggish show-off.

There’s a laddish virtuosity to suggest kinship with Gillet’s Aston, brothers in their frantically overworked minds. Mick though, turning his rage outwardly, can handle it. Aston’s inwardness cannot.

Davies proves Mick’s judgement. Similarly Davies hardly helps making his own bed, though he certainly lies in it. By contrast when Aston returns with new clothes McDiarmid’s Davies struts in his smoking jacket as a flaneur. He swells as first Aston then Mick offer him the job of caretaker. He doesn’t know however how to start helping, or stop talking.

It’s clear that Mick, in switchback cruelties and casual suggestions to Davies, isn’t entirely well either, though Riddiford emphasizes Mick’s brio. Orton learned much from Mick, as Pinter palpably did here from Beckett (the Godot-esque shoes swap, the bag thrown about like a hat). Riddiford though seems more to prophesy Orton.

His Mick functions by snarly assertion, frantic indirections and trip-wire tests. Any true interaction with his brother comes early, where they all tussle for Davies’ new bag of clothes. Nevertheless Mick remains watchful and protective of Aston; wants him to make his own mind up. Their co-dependence – Aston too once talked frantically – shades in their damage.

Aston’s monologue, two weeks before the final scenes, disabuses gentility and proves the highlight of this production. Gillen carries pain in his face like a wound from a Dostoevsky novel. There’s an un-bewildered fury and clear sense that half his mind’s taken from him, which he resisted violently. He no longer visits anywhere he knew before his treatment.

With Gillen, who in his 2016 Amadeus Mozart inhabited a frantic talker, you believe both his previous loquacity, and his present lucidity: as if for a moment the veil’s lifted and Aston talks nearer his inner self. This is the finest Aston I’ve seen.

And it’s Aston, feeling Davies’ ingratitude – seeking to oust him from the flat, jabbering to prove his existence – who suggests Davies’ next move.

Three remarkable performances edge The Caretaker to new ground. Audibert’s directorial debut at Chichester proves both thrilling and prescient. Its freshly-stripped detail and pacey unfolding might prove a hallmark as Audibert impresses his tenure here.

Published June 16, 2024June 18, 2024 by Simon Jenner