Report on The Caretaker by Harold Pinter

“I went into a room and saw one person standing up and one person sitting down, and few weeks later I wrote The Room. I went into another room and saw two people sitting down, and a few years later I wrote The Birthday Party. I looked through a door into a third room and saw two people standing up and I wrote The Caretaker.”- Harold Pinter’s tongue for how he wrote The Caretaker.

The Caretaker is a play by Harold Pinter. It was first published by both Encore Publishing and Eyre Methuen in 1960. The action of the play takes place in a house in west London. This play is a study of the unexpected strength of family ties against an intruder. Family relationships are one of the main thematic concerns of the play.

Another prevalent theme is the characters' inability to communicate productively with one another. The play depends more on dialogue than on action; however, though there are fleeting moments in which each of them does seem to reach some understanding with the other, more often, they avoid communicating with one another as a result of their own psychological insecurities and self-concerns. The theme of isolation appears to result from the characters' inability to communicate with one another, and the characters' own narrowness seems to make worse their difficulty in communicating with others.

The characters also engage in deceiving one another and themselves. Davies uses an assumed name and has convinced himself that he is really going to resolve his problems relating to his lack of identity papers, even though he appears too lazy to take any such responsibility for his own actions and blames. Aston believes that his dream of building a shed will eventually reach completion, despite his mental disability. Mick believes that his ambitions for a successful career outweigh his responsibility to care for his mentally damaged brother. In the end however all three men are deceiving themselves. Their lives may continue on beyond the end of the play just as they are at the beginning and throughout it. The deceit and isolation in the play lead to a world where time, place, identity, and language are ambiguous and fluid.

The language and plot of The Caretaker blends realism with the Theatre of the Absurd. In the Theatre of the Absurd language is used in a manner that heightens the audience's awareness of the language itself, often through repetition of dialogue. The play has often been compared to Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, and other absurd plays because of its apparent lack of plot and action.

The Caretaker is filled with exaggerate rants and the language is either choppy dialogue or long speeches that are a vocalized train of thought. Although, the text is presented in a casual way there is always a message behind its simplicity. Pinter is often concerned with "communication itself, or rather the deliberate evasion of communication".

The play's disconnected language and rhythms are musically balanced through strategically placed pauses. Pinter toys with silence, where it is used in the play and what emphasis it places on the words when they are at last spoken.

The Caretaker is a drama of mixed modes; both tragic and comic, it is a tragicomedy. Elements of comedy appear in the monologues of Davies and Mick, and the characters' interactions at times even approach farce. For instance, the first scene of Act Two, which critics have compared to the hat and shoe sequences in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, is particularly farcical:

ASTON offers the bag to DAVIES.
MICK grabs it.
ASTON takes it.
MICK grabs it.
DAVIES reaches for it.
ASTON takes it.
MICK reaches for it.
ASTON gives it to DAVIES.
MICK grabs it. Pause.

Davies' confusion, repetitions, and attempts to deceive both brothers and to play each one against the other are also farcical. Davies has pretended to be someone else and using an assumed name, "Bernard Jenkins". But, in response to separate inquiries by Aston and Mick, it appears that Davies' real name is not really "Bernard Jenkins" but that it is "Mac Davies" and that he is actually Welsh and not English, a fact that he is attempting to conceal throughout the play and that motivates him to "get down to Sidcup", the past location of a British Army Records Office, to get his identity "papers".

The elements of tragedy occur in Aston's climactic monologue about his shock treatments in "that place" and at the end of the play, though the ending is still somewhat ambiguous: at the very end, it appears that the brothers are turning Davies, an old homeless man, out of what may be his last chance for shelter, mainly because of his inabilities to adjust socially to one another, or their respective "anti-social" qualities.

We can summarize the play by saying:

“Aston, a young man in his early thirties, rescues a poor old tramp from a fight. He brings him home to his room in a large house, gives him a place to sleep and offers him a job as caretaker. The tramp is reluctant to take the job, but he obviously likes the shelter and struggles to establish a foothold in the room. Mick, Aston’s younger brother, sees through the old man immediately and reacts by threatening him with violence, yet stops short of throwing him out, possibly out of respect for his brother. The three are caught up in a battle for power and territory that centres absurdly on a room full of junk. Davies, the old man, tries to play one brother against the other in his fight for space and status, changing his alliances constantly as he struggles to possess and hold a position in the house. The way that these three characters behave with each other has had the power to captivate audiences since the play’s first production in 1960. It deals with human responses that are basic to all mankind and that express a darker sense of man’s insecurity, aggressiveness or hypocrisy. In addition to the characters’ pursuit of status and power over one another, other themes that are touched on in the play include self delusion, the difficulty of communication, racism, family, mental illness and the plight of the poor. The depth and perception shown in the author’s dialogue, plus his use of both comedy and tragedy, all contribute to The Caretaker’s reputation as a modern masterpiece.”