Unwrapping Mummies

The Caretaker (by Harold Pinter) ups curtain on a West London room that looks like the Pharaoh's tomb of a junkman. There are bales of yellowed newspapers, moldy tennis rackets, scattered bureau drawers, a sink bowl, and a disconnected gas stove graced with a gilt plaster Buddha. There is a lawn mower and a blowtorch. On a rope strung from the leaky roof hangs a paint bucket into which drops of water plunk like the tick-tock of doom. Into this dusty, chilly tomb, English Playwright Pinter deposits three mummies of modern man, who proceed to strip off each other's wrappings with ripples of humor, glints of malice and a passionate alternating current of regard and disregard for their common humanity.

The room is the property of two odd brothers. The elder (Robert Shaw) has been in a mental institution, and between long silences he constructs his thoughts with the meticulous intensity of a child building a tower of blocks; the younger (Alan Bates) is a tradesman who only occasionally visits the room. In a gesture of almost absent-minded Samaritanism, the elder brother invites an old tramp to share his quarters.

This bum, memorably played by Donald Pleasence, is the smelliest, itchiest, un-deloused scamp ever plucked from the rim of a rubbish barrel. Every time he opens his mouth, he picks at the scab of past wrongs and present hates. A wily slum serf, the tramp raises a mock one-finger salute to his masters, and plays the brothers off against each other. They, in turn, offer him the nebulous post of care taker, and finally, in mutual revulsion, cast him out to an unknown fate.

In defiance of its spider-thin plot line, The Caretaker is completely absorbing--the kind of drama that leaves playgoers too intent to cough because they are forced to follow the play on several levels of meaning.

Psychologically, each of the characters is paralyzed by failures of will and nerve, and the junk-cluttered room reflects that impasse. Yet, each of them nurses a delusionary hope that if he can take a certain first step in self-therapy, he can "get this place going," as the tramp caretaker puts it. The elder brother believes that his salvation lies in building a workshop in the yard, but he is finicky about using only "good wood," and he gets to a hardware store so belatedly that the jig saw he needs is "gone." The tramp plans to make a trip to a nearby town for some personal papers that will clarify his identity, yet he repeatedly puts it off because his shoes and the weather are not quite right. The younger brother believes that he himself will forge ahead with big plans when his brother is cured. Locked in the cycle of self-concern, as Playwright Pinter subtly emphasizes through individual repetitive speech patterns, no one of the characters can save himself. Each member of this weirdly disparate trio needs the others, but the language of cooperation is not in them, and they niggle with all-too-human stubbornness over whether a window should be up or down. Their final tragedy is to deny their mutual need and fall apart into isolation.

Philosophically, this is a telling restatement of man's eternal aloneness. Politically, it seems like a parable of humanity's pressing international predicament. Theatrically, The Caretaker represents a high order of aesthetic achievement, the kind of drama that at play's end no longer belongs to the playwright, but to every sentient playgoer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.