UK Theatre Network

The Caretaker

Octagon Theatre, Bolton

6 March 2009

Departing Octagon director Mark Babych is giving Bolton audiences a brief opportunity to see Harold Pinter’s early drama The Caretaker.  This slightly surreal three-hander is a stage version of scissors-paper-stone, as a trio of oddly-assorted characters vie for supremacy in a seedy bedsit.

The story, such as it is, begins when social misfit Aston invites a tramp, Davies, to share a squalid room in his brother’s derelict house.  At first Davies is all gratitude, and Aston contemplates turning the temporary stay into permanent tenure, offering his guest the position of caretaker.  However the atmosphere soon turns sour – and not just because of the tramp’s lack of personal hygiene - when Aston’s brother Mick turns up and begins playing his tenants off against each other. 

RSC veteran Paul Webster is superb as the revolting itinerant Davies.  There have been younger, more vigorous interpretations of this role where the tramp becomes as physically dangerous as Mick, but here his frailty explains why he needs to insinuate himself so carefully with the older brother.  There are moments of real comedy too – when Aston brings Davies some second-hand shoes the old man sticks his nose deep inside them and relishes their odour like a connoisseur savouring the complex bouquet of a vintage burgundy.  And his self-delusion is all too clear when he proudly struts around in a scarlet smoking jacket worn incongruously over a pair of dirty long-johns.

Jeff Hordley is the semi-psychopathic Mick, all leather-jacket, drainpipes and winkle-pickers.  This is a 360^o portrayal of a disturbing and sadistic character - even when he’s terrorising Davies you can detect the twinkle of enjoyment in his eye.

However the real stand-out performance comes from Matthew Rixon as Aston.  The Octagon’s costume department has done a fine job of establishing him as a Brylcreemed, jacket-and-tie-wearing archetype of Fifties respectability, so he seems not to belong to Pinter’s world at all but to come from a completely different fictional landscape – perhaps something by Barbara Pym or Iris Murdoch. 

It’s the actor himself though who creates a vulnerable and apparently placid character who has depth and stillness at the centre of his being.  Aston’s repeated actions, whether dressing or undressing or rolling a cigarette, are slow, deliberate and occasionally bemusing but always compelling to watch.  And the long monologue describing a traumatic incident in his earlier life, subtly emphasised by Brent Lees’s delicate lighting, is a drama in itself.

Richard Foxton’s thrust stage design is the ideal way to draw an audience into the play’s sordid atmosphere.  Aston’s clutter invades the whole playing area instead of being stuck at the back of a proscenium arch.  The front of the stage is piled with broken chairs, battered suitcases and piles of yellowing newspapers, and the attention to detail extends as far as the clouds of dust beaten from an old blanket.

This is an excellent production of a modern classic with exemplary acting all round, but hurry up and book because you only have three weeks to catch it.

The Caretaker is on at Bolton Octagon until Saturday 28 March 2009

Tickets: from £9.00

Evenings: Mon-Sat at 7.30pm

Matinees: Wednesday 18 March and Saturday 28 March @ 2pm

Box Office: 01204 520661

www.octagonbolton.co.uk