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The Caretaker & The Dumb Waiter

Harold Pinter

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May 26, 2009 Lynne rated it really liked it

The story of The Caretaker revolves around a drifter named Davies who ends up being taken in by a man named Aston who lives in one room of a run-down house owned by his brother, Mick. After meeting each other at a pub, Aston, who once spent time in a psychiatric hospital and seems to have been lobotomized, allows Davies to come home with him and offers up a spare bed in his room.

Each brother, at different times, offers Davies the job of caretaker in this house and toward the end of the play the The story of The Caretaker revolves around a drifter named Davies who ends up being taken in by a man named Aston who lives in one room of a run-down house owned by his brother, Mick. After meeting each other at a pub, Aston, who once spent time in a psychiatric hospital and seems to have been lobotomized, allows Davies to come home with him and offers up a spare bed in his room.

Each brother, at different times, offers Davies the job of caretaker in this house and toward the end of the play there is a hilarious exchange between Davies and Mick that involves defining what exactly a caretaker does; Mick seems to think it involves interior decorating.

The exchanges between all three men get more vague and menacing as the play goes on, and because of the uncertainty between the characters the reader (or viewer) is mostly kept off balance as well. Like the show Lost , we never know where these characters stand and it’s difficult to know with whom our sympathies should lie.

For the second play, The Dumb Waiter, think Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with absurdity to spare but no caricatures as characters. In another one-room setting, typical of Pinter, the play shows us two men, Gus and Ben, waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting . . . for a hit to go down. Along the way we are treated to the type of dialogue that is well-known to Pinter fans—decidedly masculine and curt—about everyday situations in an absurdist setting. My favorite part involves the dumb waiter alluded to in the title—best use of a dumb waiter in a novel since I read Harriet the Spy as a little girl. Of course, our two protagonists are dumb waiters as well. Oh that Pinter—too clever by half.

Similar to classical music, in which the silent spaces between the notes are as important as the musical notes themselves, Pinter’s silences are menacing, and the true personalities of Gus and Ben emerge not in their words but in their ominous silences.

And, like all Pinter plays, the specific circumstances portrayed cause us to reflect on the general. The fact that Gus and Ben, like Estragon and Vladimir, take their orders from an absent being “above” forces us to deliberate on human existence in relation to government, behemoth organizations, and, gulp, religion. Cool beans.

Interweaving pathos, comedy, and suspense, both of these plays, are, at base, studies in non-communication that are almost surreally real.
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