STAGE REVIEW : LATC Offers a Precise, Bloodless Pinter

“What’s the game?” asks one of the brothers in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” suspicious-like. It’s a question that many people have asked about the play since it was first performed in 1960.

What’s going on here? Are the two “brothers” (John Vickery and Jim Piddock at LATC) really brothers, and which is the crazy one? What’s their game with the old vagrant (Robin Gammell)--do they plan to knock him off for his identity card? Is the junky old room at the top of the empty house a symbol of something?

Alan Mandell’s revival at the Los Angeles Theatre Center is careful not to answer these questions. It gives us the old man and the brothers; the junky old room (better swept than usual, in set designer John Iacovelli’s rendition); and, scrupulously, Pinter’s language. After that, it’s up to us.

Up to a point, we appreciate the confidence. Especially if we remember Pinter productions where the director knew exactly what the play was about and reduced everything else in the play to support his thesis. A big mistake with this playwright, a duke of dark corners.

This “Caretaker” does well not to impose a meaning on the play, but to let the spectator see it as he will--as a demonstration, for example, of the fact that a third party (the old man) can actually be employed to revive the bond between two people (the brothers), after which the intruder will be ruthlessly discarded.

Certainly Gammell gets a very strong signal, the first time that he sees the brothers together, that he is dealing with an entity here. We get the signal too, without a word or a gesture from Vickery or Piddock--one of those mysterious effects which actors in tune with Pinter know how to manage.

Such shocks are part of the payoff in his plays: moments where we realize that the situation may not be what it appears to be at all. There weren’t enough of them at Friday night’s opening. Mandell and his actors were so fastidious about avoiding cheap melodrama and/or bogus symbolism that they offered the play as a geometrical diagram--every step clear, every move accounted for, every syllable notated, and everything played strictly from the head.

This worked nicely for the comic side of the play, as in the scene where the brothers and the old man swap round the vagrant’s bag like a hot potato. The vaudeville exchanges (Pinter owes as much to vaudeville as Beckett does) also went wittily. As when Pinter himself performed in “Old Times” at the Henry Fonda Theatre, we realized that there are many moments when he absolutely doesn’t want a pause. Keep it in the air.

Did we feel concern, however, in the middle of Vickery’s monologue about what “they” did to his brain? Were we touched by the fact that the poor soul didn’t seem to feel any emotion as he told his story--that it all seemed to have happened to somebody else?

Did we then get the strange feeling that it had happened to somebody else? This listener didn’t. It was a beautifully objective reading of a beautifully crafted speech, so discreet about manipulating the listener that it failed to involve him.

That’s carrying fastidiousness to the point of phobia. A less immaculate reading of “The Caretaker” would give a more convincing sense of its dark corners, and these actors are capable of it--Gammell, with his wild Dickensian glare; Vickery, whose prim surface ought to cover an enormous yearning (we don’t need to know for what); Piddock, the cheeky, dangerous one.

We listen all the way, and we come out with our little theories, but this “Caretaker” is too careful not to get its skirts dirty. Pinter has got to be done precisely, but that’s only the start of the game.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2. Closes Aug. 21. Tickets $22-$25. 514 S. Spring St; (213) 627-5599.

‘THE CARETAKER’

Harold Pinter’s play, at Theatre Two, the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Director Alan Mandell. With Robin Gammell, Jim Piddock, John Vickery. Set John Iacovelli. Lighting Toshiro Ogawa. Costumes Ann Bruce. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Stage manager Joan Toggenburger.