The Caretaker Full Text

[Elder Raman]

The Caretaker is a drama in three acts by Harold Pinter. Although it was the sixth of his major works for stage and television, this psychological study of the confluence of power, allegiance, innocence, and corruption among two brothers and a tramp, became Pinter's first significant commercial success.[1][2] It premiered at the Arts Theatre Club in London's West End on 27 April 1960 and transferred to the Duchess Theatre the following month, where it ran for 444 performances before departing London for Broadway.[2] In 1963, a film version of the play based on Pinter's unpublished screenplay was directed by Clive Donner. The movie starred Alan Bates as Mick and Donald Pleasence as Davies in their original stage roles, while Robert Shaw replaced Peter Woodthorpe as Aston. First published by both Encore Publishing and Eyre Methuen in 1960, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter's most celebrated and oft-performed plays.

According to Pinter's biographer Michael Billington, the playwright frequently discussed details of The Caretaker's origins in relation to images from his own life. Billington notes in his authorised biography that Pinter said he had written the play while he and his first wife Vivien Merchant were living in Chiswick:

[The flat was] a very clean couple of rooms with a bath and kitchen. There was a chap who owned the house: a builder, in fact, like Mick who had his own van and whom I hardly ever saw. The only image of him was of this swift mover up and down the stairs and of his van going . . . Vroom . . . as he arrived and departed. His brother lived in the house. He was a handyman . . . he managed rather more successfully than Aston, but he was very introverted, very secretive, had been in a mental home some years before and had had some kind of electrical shock treatment . . . ECT, I think . . . Anyway, he did bring a tramp back one night. I call him a tramp, but he was just a homeless old man who stayed three or four weeks.

For earlier critics, like Martin Esslin, The Caretaker suggests aspects of the Theatre of the Absurd, described by Esslin in his eponymous book coining that term first published in 1961; according to Esslin, absurdist drama by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugne Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Edward Albee, and others was prominent in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a reaction to chaos witnessed in World War II and the state of the world after the war.[citation needed]

Billington observes that "The idea that [Davies] can affirm his identity and recover his papers by journeying to Sidcup is perhaps the greatest delusion of all, although one with its source in reality"; as "Pinter's old Hackney friend Morris Wernick recalls, 'It is undoubtedly true that Harold, with a writer's ear, picked up words and phrases from each of us. He also picked up locales. The Sidcup in The Caretaker comes from the fact that the Royal Artillery HQ was there when I was a National Serviceman and its almost mythical quality as the fount of all permission and record was a source.' To English ears," Billington continues, "Sidcup has faintly comic overtones of suburban respectability. For Davies it is a Kentish Eldorado: the place that can solve all the problems about his unresolved identity and uncertain past, present and future" (122).

The trap with Harold's work, for performers and audiences, is to approach it too earnestly or portentously. I have always tried to interpret his plays with as much humour and humanity as possible. There is always mischief lurking in the darkest corners. The world of The Caretaker is a bleak one, its characters damaged and lonely. But they are all going to survive. And in their dance to that end they show a frenetic vitality and a wry sense of the ridiculous that balance heartache and laughter. Funny, but not too funny. As Pinter wrote, back in 1960 : "As far as I am concerned The Caretaker IS funny, up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be funny, and it is because of that point that I wrote it."[3]

[The Caretaker] remains, however, a remorselessly accurate record of its time. At the center of the drama is the horrifically indiscriminate use of shock therapy, which left one of the characters with brain damage; Matthew Rixon's disturbingly docile Aston is a brilliant portrait of the horrors inflicted by a supposedly civilised state. The climax comes in the harrowing monologue in which he recalls the moment the electrodes were attached. The lights close down on his traumatised features as he speaks, leaving us uncomfortably alone with his thoughts.[4]

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.[5]

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 and circumventing dialogue.

The fluidity of the characters is explained by Ronald Knowles as follows: "Language, character, and being are here aspects of each other made manifest in speech and silence. Character is no longer the clearly perceived entity underlying clarity of articulation the objectification of a social and moral entelechy but something amorphous and contingent (41).

One of the keys to understanding Pinter's language is not to rely on the words a character says but to look for the meaning behind the text. The Caretaker is filled with long rants and non-sequiturs, the language is either choppy dialogue full of interruptions or long speeches that are a vocalised 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" (Knowles 43).

The play's staccato 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.[3][4] Elements of comedy appear in the monologues of Davies and Mick, and the characters' interactions at times even approach farce.[3] For instance, the first scene of Act Two, which critics have compared to the hat and shoe sequences in Beckett's Waiting for Godot,[citation needed] is particularly farcical:

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 (and their) inabilities to adjust socially to one another, or their respective "anti-social" qualities.[citation needed]

In his 1960 book review of The Caretaker, fellow English playwright John Arden writes: "Taken purely at its face value this play is a study of the unexpected strength of family ties against an intruder."[6] As Arden states, 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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]

The theme of isolation appears to result from the characters' inability to communicate with one another, and the characters' own insularity seems to exacerbate their difficulty communicating with others.[citation needed]

As the characters also engage in deceiving one another and themselves, deception and self-deception are motifs, and certain deceptive phrases and self-deceptive strategies recur as refrains throughout the dialogue. 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 his inaction on everyone but himself. Aston believes that his dream of building a shed will eventually reach fruition, 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.[citation needed]

On 27 April 1960, the first production of The Caretaker opened at the Arts Theatre, in London, prior to transferring to the West End's Duchess Theatre on 30 May 1960. It starred Donald Pleasence as Davies, Alan Bates as Mick, and Peter Woodthorpe as Aston. The productions received generally strong reviews.[7]

Another significant difference between a caregiver and a personal caretaker is having well-defined boundaries and limits between the care provider and the person they care for. If the caretaker and patient cross the set boundaries, it might lead to codependency or a mental, emotional, and physical reliance on the caretaker. This can ruin a healthy relationship and can be harmful not only to the patient but to anyone involved.

Members of the family and professional caregivers are the most common type of caregivers. But there are other types if the first two are unavailable. These alternatives can also provide medical and non-medical support to a patient.

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