Harold Pinter

'At the Crucible, rookie main house director Jamie Lloyd proves his mettle with a production that seems grounded in the everyday and is yet also edged with weirdness.' (Lynn Gardner, The Guardian). Harold Pinter's plays are being revived with spectacular regularity. Does the Sheffield Crucible's production of 'The Caretaker' help you to understand why?'

Comments

[Alison Norden]

After having seen Jamie Lloyd’s production of ‘The Caretaker’, it became very evident as to why people are more often engaging in Pinter’s plays. At a fundamental level, ‘The Caretaker’ offers a vision of human existence and is very true to the way we talk and go about our lives however, it is perhaps the humour derived from absurd topics of conversation which, although they instil a sense of strangeness, provoke laughter. Without considering the Crucible’s production, many people acknowledge the qualities of ‘The Caretaker’ such as the actor Timothy West, who it an interview said: -
‘In The Caretaker, everybody's actions really, Micks, and Aston's and Davies's, although they are peculiar and wonderfully convoluted in a Pinteresque way, you actually know what they're on about, and I think people related to that a lot more immediately.’
West confirms this universal feel of being able to relate to the everyday life drama that Pinter captures on stage, and this is clearly a mechanism, along with the comic actions that cause people to engage in such plays.
Lyn Gardner, in The Guardian wrote of the Crucible’s production, ‘you can see the physical reality of the characters, but also get a sense of their internal emotional plumbing. The production gurgles, drips and seeps not so much with menace as with the sad leak of human dampness.’ I feel the play did convey the true brutality of people. David Bradley adopted a character that we could identify as arrogant, uncompassionate, and selfish. They are all locked in this prison, demonstrating the anger, lack of motivation, and pointlessness riving in people’s lives.
For me I can understand why Pinter’s plays are successful, but I feel my judgement could be somewhat thwarted as I saw ‘The Caretaker’ before having read the play. As a result when reading the play I had Lloyd’s production in mind. I have said this because I wonder if I had read ‘The Caretaker’ first, if I would have been disappointed with the production because The Times’ Sam Marlowe wrote that the production was not sinister enough, Mick lacked aggression and you never get a true sense of threat. Perhaps it did lack aggression? However, I feel that the use of language, the everyday, and humour which was clearly conveyed in the play, demonstrates Pinter’s success as the audience very much enjoyed the production.
Sir Philip Sidney said that ‘laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature.’ This is true of this play as people probably laugh because some of the scenes are absurd, however Sidney also says that comedy is an imitation of ourselves. The audience can laugh at this play, but in reality everyday we engage in conversations that are convoluted and sometimes pointless.
‘The Caretaker’ presents this absurdity at points such as Davies’ long speech about his shoes, ‘I said, you haven’t got a pair of shoes, have you, a pair of shoes, I said’. It is notable that with most exchanges there is a lot of back channelling, monitoring features, replies are not always expected, and approaches to the same topic are made in many different ways. It seems ridiculous that Aston should be concerned about the thickness of a beer mug and that they ponder over dreaming. Mick gives really long speeches about people he has met and about the tenancy, which is not really expected. I feel Nigel Harman’s interpretation of Mick’s aspirations for his ‘teal-blue, copper and parchment linoleum squares’ was done very effectively. His tone gave a real sense of passion and this of course provoked laughter. Mick’s speech continually flouts Grice’s Maxims as he often gives more information than is required. This generates humour. However, other characters flout these Maxims as in their adjacency pairs they may give minimal information, or change topic altogether without indication, and then come back channel to answer a question, and they use fillers. This is realistic of everyday speech but it seems weird in this case, probably because although we do not mind when our own topics seem pointless, these topics seem pointless as we are not part of the exchange.
Overall, the humour and interaction with a simple, everyday life which was portrayed well at the Crucible helps to understand why Pinter’s plays should be successful.

[Matthew Comras]

The Crucible’s production of The Caretaker had throwbacks to the original production of Streetcar in terms of the atmosphere created in the theatre. Just as perfume was pumped into the theatre which was kept especially hot to create the tense claustrophobia in Streetcar, The Crucible was kept fairly cold and coupled with the sound of the dripping roof the atmosphere was thoroughly miserable. This misery is reflected in the attitude of Davies especially and acted as a perfect background for the mood of the play to unfold.

In terms of why there has been such a resurgence of Pinter plays being shown recently, part of the reason must be that they have become relevant social commentary once again. As a man who keeps more than an eye on the political situation, Pinter (who was very outspoken against the war in Iraq), wrote most of his plays as reactions to contemporary moods and events. With the current world situation, plays like The Homecoming, which is a representation of the ‘human jungle’ and The Caretaker, which shows the darker less compassionate side of man, it is easy to see why` the plays of Pinter have enjoyed a renewed resonance.

[Francesca Soper]

Pinter has been associated with the 'theatre of the absurd'; Beckett's drama virtually dicards conventional dramatic forms and theatrical devices, however in 'The Caretaker' Pinter does not completely reject them. There is something that resembles a plot, though one might find it puzzling, and there are characters who have some connection to reality even though it might be difficult to understand their actions and motivations.

The subtle lighting in the Crucible production wins through over any sense of over-familiarity in a tense and effective production. It also helps the big stage of the Crucible more intimate and claustrophobic, and makes the audience feel more involved in the play. There is not much furniture, however Pinter's plays are not normally known for their extravagant stage furniture. The minimalist style of the stage, and the low-key direction prduces an overall colour of grey which creates a miserable and cold atmosphere. I was really aware of the constant drip, which also adds to this miserable atmosphere and made me feel as though I was in the room with the characters.

[stephen wischhusen]

Readers of the blog may like to know that a recording of the 1960 Duchess Theatre production with Alan Bates Donald Pleasance, and Peter Woodthorpe is now available on 2 cds from Classics for Pleasure, a bargain price label, and perhaps this should be in all university drama sections libraries !

[Emma Nolan]

In the review from ‘The Guardian’, I think Lynn Gardner picks upon the main reason as to why Harold Pinter’s plays are being regularly revived – they are ‘grounded in the everyday’ but are ‘edged with weirdness’. Pinter seems to take an everyday, particularly mundane situation and confine it an equally ordinary setting; but has a somewhat unique ability to make this seem threatening and unfamiliar. The production put on at the Crucible, I felt, expressed this rather well. The set was of a cold, dusty and dilapidated room in a boarding house, filled with useless items and bits of junk – nothing particularly special or initially threatening. With the sound and lighting effects, however, and the restriction of the characters in this one room, I would argue that the apparently ordinary scene was becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

The emphasis upon this ordinary room and the ‘ordinary’ interaction between these three characters make the audience question what is happening – I think it creates a suspicion. The audience know nothing about the characters, their history, their disposition etc. but they are watching them in this room, waiting for something. There isn’t a continual exchange of seemingly ‘key’ dialogue; instead it mirrors the conversations of ordinary people, for example, their discussion of the draught created by the window. Their exchange of words are punctuated by the famous ‘Pinter pauses’, periods of silence that become increasingly awkward and uncomfortable. This lack of communication and confinement, I found, created some sort of invisible, outside threat. This is what edged the seemingly everyday with weirdness.

I think this production helps to explain the Pinter revival because it demonstrates how his plays and their interpretations can be translated and understood in today’s society. The lack of communication between the characters, their awkwardness and use of dark humour are not lost when taken out of their context. People today are still ignorant to many aspects of each other as well as society – they are threatened by the unfamiliar and fill their daily lives with mundane activities; fixing a toaster, talking about draughty windows, a good pair of shoes, talking about their dreams and aspirations rather than fulfilling them.

[James Morris]

The sense of impending Mutually Assured Destruction which accompanying the creation of many of Pinter's early plays is, in my opinion, a sense which, to a lesser degree perhaps, is still pervasive in 21st century Britain. The atom bomb can easily translate to a terrorist attack, while the perceived communist threat of the 1950's is demonstrated in the wielder of such an attack.

The underlying distrust and dissatisfaction of interacting with one's fellow man, which formed the basis for much of Pinter's The Caretaker, is one which seems to be sadly universal, while the need for humour, dark as it may be, is the ever-present search for an accompanying remedy. Thus, examining the Pinteresque as that strange combination of threat and laughter at the shadows behind the everyday opens doors for a critical re-assessment of the social implications of plays like the Caretaker.

This particular production has proven, at least, that solace in a confused world is found in an acceptance of the state of things. The audience, in the submersion of a Pinter play, comes to recognise that such a state is a precariously balanced one at best when left in the hands of men whose jaded and confused microcosm is found in the equivalent personages of Aston, Mick and Davies and in the seemingly eternal quest for selfish power.

[aga]

The first thing I noticed when entering the Crucible was the distance between the audience and the stage and the immensity of the latter.Would it not be easier and more accurate to stage The Caretaker in Crucible’s Studio where its small stage and ‘homely ‘ interior seem more suitable for the claustrophobic atmosphere of the play ?
Yet,in his Crucibe production, Jamie Lloyd allows the spectator to have a distant look at the characters and in so doing to realise how ‘suffocating’ is indeed their world .This also marks Pinter’s interest in space and territory. The characters are trapped in their own prison of words and souvenirs and-more pragmatically-in this stuffed with brick-a-bracks dusty room.
David Bradley gives a fantastic performance in which he captures the quintessence of Pinter`s character of Davies. He adds to this role such passion that when reading The Caretaker after having seen it staged, one is literally trapped in Bradley`s interpretation of Davies!
The three actors gave such powerful performances that I felt as if I watched three parallel one-man-shows.
What is more, the omnipresent and sometimes uneasy pauses and silences in The Caretaker create an incredibly close relationship between the spectator and the artists.It seemed as if the audience AND the actors expected some sort of response or immediate reaction after every pause.Such effect is only possible in the theatre and Lloyd`s production considered every little aspect of Pinter`s play that might appear unnoticable in the single lecture of the text.