Hauntingly Simple Denial

I first saw Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker a year ago in London, loved it, and didn’t have a clue as to what it was all about. When I saw it again in Manhattan recently (at the Lyceum), my regard for it remained undiminished. On second viewing, however, I am inclined to take at face value Pinter’s contention that his play has no cosmic meaning. This, I know, leaves me in the minority (and open to the charge that I still don’t know what the play means). But to interpret The Caretaker, as some viewers have, as an allegory of the cold war or as a symbolic retelling of the life of Christ seems to me only a fatuous exercise in intellect-flexing. Indeed, the power of The Caretaker comes from its disturbing and hauntingly simple denial of Donne’s line, “no man is an island.”

Pinter’s plot is so spare as to be bony. Catalyst of the action is Davies, a selfish, stinking, stubborn, scabrous, scrofulous refugee from the gutter who finds asylum in the dingy East London tenement flat of two strange brothers. The elder brother, Aston, is a vague Samaritan whose mind has been clouded by the electric shock treatments he received as an inmate in a mental hospital; his worldly younger brother, Mick, who only occasionally shares the flat, is a glitteringly glib, covertly homosexual tradesman. Rescuing Davies from a savage beating, Aston, in a moment of distracted compassion, offers him a job as caretaker of the shabby household.

JD

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J. G. Dunne

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I first saw Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker a year ago in London, loved it, and didn’t have a clue as to what it was all about. When I saw it again in Manhattan recently (at the Lyceum), my regard for it remained undiminished. On second viewing, however, I am inclined to take at face value Pinter’s contention that his play has no cosmic meaning. This, I know, leaves me in the minority (and open to the charge that I still don’t know what the play means). But to interpret The Caretaker, as some viewers have, as an allegory of the cold war or as a symbolic retelling of the life of Christ seems to me only a fatuous exercise in intellect-flexing. Indeed, the power of The Caretaker comes from its disturbing and hauntingly simple denial of Donne’s line, “no man is an island.”

Pinter’s plot is so spare as to be bony. Catalyst of the action is Davies, a selfish, stinking, stubborn, scabrous, scrofulous refugee from the gutter who finds asylum in the dingy East London tenement flat of two strange brothers. The elder brother, Aston, is a vague Samaritan whose mind has been clouded by the electric shock treatments he received as an inmate in a mental hospital; his worldly younger brother, Mick, who only occasionally shares the flat, is a glitteringly glib, covertly homosexual tradesman. Rescuing Davies from a savage beating, Aston, in a moment of distracted compassion, offers him a job as caretaker of the shabby household.