"Caretaker"
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"The Caretaker" was transferred from the Arts Theatre to the Duchess last night. This is the least puzzling and the most pleasing play that Mr Harold Porter [sic] has yet written...

-The Times

"Now it may very well be that there are symbols here. The two brothers may represent the bifurcated halves of a schizoid personality; alternatively, the landlord may stand for the Super-Ego, the tenant for the Ego, and the tramp for the Id..."

-Kenneth Tynan

"...where most playwrights devote their technical efforts to making us wonder what will happen next, Mr Pinter focuses our wonder on what is happening now. Who are these people?..."

-The Observer

"Donald Pleasence makes a remarkable creation of the tramp. Peter Woodthorpe rises finely to his opportunities as the afflicted brother, and Alan Bates gives a hard clear edge to the sane one."

-Daily Telegraph

t h e a t r e

ALAN BATES, then hardly known, was considering the role of Hotspur in "Henry IV" for television when "The Caretaker" arrived. "I told my agent that I didn't know what the play was about but it was unusual. My agent said, 'You'll do it over my dead body.' But I did. And after the first night he came round saying, 'It's wonderful, never listen to me again.'"
It was wonderful for the audience as well. Pleasence recalls, "We had that precious sort of audience who then came to what was a sort of fringe - 50 percent of them Press. After five minutes - with the reference to the monastery at Luton - they were falling about in their seats. It was a triumph of comedy."
The critics ate their old words, accepting what they had refused to accept in "The Birthday Party." "Harold Pinter has begun to fulfill the promise that I signally failed to see in "The Birthday Party,'" wrote Kenneth Tynan. "This is a play and a production which no one who is concerned with the advance of the British drama can afford to miss," judged the Daily Mail.
These vignettes of 1960 reveal two important things. They show the London theatre at a point of transition. Its old function as a frivolous, class-bound reactionary pleasure dome was being subverted by new playwrights. The responses of Hobson and Roose-Evans, Codron, Pleasence and Bates suggest there were already people who were demanding different things of plays, expecting different methods. They did not see plays as jigsaw puzzles which provided all answers, but scrambled messages which, like life itself, were puzzling, partially indecipherable and ambivalent. These people, like Pinter himself, were heralds of new theatre worlds. ...
Before the play could transfer from the Arts, which was not subject to censorship, it had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. One word, "arse-hole," turned out to be the sticking point. "Arse-hole," Pleasence recalls the Lord Chamberlain's Controller saying. "I doubt whether his Lordship has ever sanctioned an arse-hole." And arse-hole was banned. As "The Caretaker" [returned to the West End in 1991] it is worth noting that Pinter and all dramatists are now free to have as many arse-holes as they like. It is another and most important difference between then and now. |||

From the Theatre World Annual, No. 11, Review of the Year, 1960:

"...The obvious choice for our jacket and frontispiece illustration this time was Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker," which was first presented at the Arts Theatre before transferring to the Duchess. Previously London had seen Mr Pinter's "The Birthday Party" (Lyric, Hammersmith, May 1958) and the double bill consisting of "The Room" and "The Dumb Waiter" (Royal Court, March 1960). It is very difficult indeed to analyse this young playwright's genius, for on the surface his work breaks all the hitherto-accepted laws of good theatre.
In "The Caretaker" his three characters are, strictly speaking, quite unable to communicate with each other; there are long pauses and nothing tangible by way of plot. There builds up, however, a most remarkable atmosphere of tension and suspense, and in Davies, the garrulous character of the title role, Mr Pinter has created an immortal.
The humour is irresistible, and there are strands of Beckett, with the big difference that everything in "The Caretaker" could have happened any day in London. The disconnected gas stove and other odd junk, the Buddha and suspended bucket echoing at intervals with drops of water from the leaking roof, all play their part, providing the kind of stage props beloved of the author, though he emphatically denies that his plays have any symbolic meaning. That "The Caretaker" should have a popular appeal in the West End is something to marvel at: Harold Pinter knows how to hypnotise his audiences."

From The Tatler & Bystander, 15 June 1960:

"...the little piece is brilliantly directed by Mr Donald McWhinnie and brilliantly acted by Mr Donald Pleasence, Mr Peter Woodthrope and Mr Alan Bates. Mr Pleasence's bouts of ineffectual rage and groveling misery are both comic and pathetic; and Mr Bates, playing the most straightforward character straightforwardly, manages at the end to compress the brothers' secret into a single nod and a half-smile."

From The Times, 21 February 1961:

"Last night Mr Harold Pinter took over the part of Mick in "The Caretaker" from Mr Alan Bates who is on four weeks' leave of absence. It could be a thankless task for the author himself to fit in with the subtle interplay of two performances as finely interknit as those of Mr Donald Pleasence and Mr Peter Woodthorpe, but Mr Pinter's acting is wholly convincing.
He lacks, it is true, the tense, mercurial worldliness brought in as some relief to the atmosphere of defeat by Mr Bates. In return, Mr Pinter supplies a brooding sarcasm which carries its own kind of threat. His presence, timing and diction fulfill all the demands made."

The Caretaker" ended its West End run at the Duchess Theatre on 27 May 1961 after 452 performances, with a profit of £35,000.