The Caretaker

The Caretaker is a play by Harold Pinter.It was first performed on stage at the Arts Theatre, London, on 27 April 1960; it transferred to the Duchess Theatre the next month. Its first run included 444 performances.

According to his official authorised biographer, Michael Billington, Pinter "talked in detail about the play's origins" in images from his own personal experience and observations for the first time with him (in the mid 1990s), when Pinter told Billington that he wrote the play while he and his first wife Vivien Merchant

"were living [… ] in this first-floor flat in Chiswick: 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." […] Mick, as he says, was the most purely invented character of the three. For the tramp [Davies], however, he had a certain fellow feeling. […] "It [the Pinters' life in Chiswick] was a very threadbare existence . . . very . . . I was totally out of work. So I was very close to this old derelict's world, in a way."(Harold Pinter 114–17).

 

About directing a production of The Caretaker at the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2003, David Jones observed:

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 humor 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."

source: Wikipedia


-- Πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα παράσταση

Στο Απλό Θέατρο, παραστάσεις μέχρι τον Απρίλιο του 2011

Ντέιβις (επιστάτης): Δημήτρης Καταλειφός
Άστον (μεγάλος αδερφός): Λαέρτης Βασιλείου
Μικ (μικρός αδερφός): Χάρης Φραγκούλης