Caretaker's Caretaker

If Britain's so-called Angry Young Men are already half forgotten, their own limitations are the principal cause, but they have been given a forceful, added shove toward oblivion by the work of a new writer whose themes are quieter and deeper. Already hailed in London as one of the major playwrights of the decade, 31-year-old Harold Pinter has come to Manhattan with The Caretaker (TIME, Oct. 13), the biggest serious hit of the new season.

Anything but an angry young exercise in social realism, The Caretaker is a study of the human condition at the outer limit of endurance, both funny and tragic, paradoxically baffling and plausible, gifted with the poet's touch of universality, and turned out in colloquial dialogue that is breathtakingly cadenced and exact. It has been interpreted as everything from an allegory of the cold war to a modern view of Christ, man, and Satan, but unlike so much of the so-called avant-garde, it is thoroughly alive on Level One: the stage.

Most of Pinter's plays, mainly one-acters, have dealt with small, desperate souls in small, unkempt rooms, tuning in on them with cruel precision, but making no attempt to particularize or resolve their dilemmas. Three years ago, his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, was greeted by a chorus of derision from London critics and ran for only a week before audiences averaging 20 people. But Pinter's drab and isolated rooms, surrounded by the menace of the unknown and the uncontrollable, gradually seemed less obscure. The Birthday Party was revived with great success, and was also performed on commercial TV. Two one-acters, The Room and The Dumb Waiter, played for eight weeks in a limited run. The Caretaker was the London drama critics' choice as the best play of last season.

Pinter owes much of his success to his sense of theatrical immediacy, acquired during twelve years as an actor. Darkly handsome, with black curly hair and threatening eyebrows, he was born in the grimy East End of London, the only child of a Jewish tailor. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he admired an eccentric master with a wild passion for the theater who liked to throw inkwells out the window and strode the halls shouting lines from Othello.

Thus inspired, Pinter enrolled in 1948 at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but found it "a poof's paradise--well, that's a bit unfair, but there was a terrible atmosphere of affectation and unreality, ankle bands and golden hair." Later he got a job as an actor, played with various repertory companies, and married Actress Vivien Merchant (they have one son).

At a party in London five years ago, he came upon two people in a small room. One was a little man with bare feet "carrying on a lively and rather literate conversation, and at the table next to him sat an enormous lorry driver. He had his cap on and he hardly said a word. And all the while, as he talked, the little man was feeding the big man--cutting his bread, buttering it, and so on. Well, this image would never leave me." From it, Pinter wrote his first play, The Room. But he didn't give up acting entirely. Last year he played for five months in The Caretaker in London.

His subsequent preoccupation with little people jabbering in little rooms has begun to trouble him slightly. The form might too easily change to formula, diluting itself until he writes a play with "two old ladies in a room, arguing over a glass of milk." But he has no patience for critics who think nothing much is going on in his rooms. "A character," he says, "who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behavior, or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives, is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as anyone who, alarmingly, can do all these things."

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