Stage : South Coast’s ‘Caretaker’ Speaks With Eloquence

Leaving “The Caretaker” at South Coast Repertory the other night, a man was overheard asking his companion, “But why do this play now ?”

The answer was inaudible. And the question was one that Harold Pinter might not relish. Like most playwrights, he has said that he wants his work to speak for itself, without any extraneous layers of topical meaning.

In Paul Marcus’ staging, “The Caretaker” does speak for itself, very eloquently. Marcus, a British director who is best known in this area for a South Coast “School for Scandal” that took plenty of liberties in order to update an antique text, treats “The Caretaker” carefully, with almost total fidelity to its 1960 period and to Pinter’s script.

This doesn’t mean that we can embalm this “Caretaker” and put it behind glass. More than previous “Caretakers” I’ve seen, this one sidles off the stage and into our brains.

The venue has a lot to do with this. South Coast’s Second Stage is surrounded by audience on three sides. No one is more than a few rows from the action. It’s a perfect place to see a play that’s set entirely in one quiet, cluttered room.

The trio of actors is well chosen. Robert Cornthwaite plays the old transient Davies, who is brought home to this dismal West London flat by James Lancaster’s kind-hearted Aston, only to discover that Tom Harrison, as Aston’s domineering brother Mick, waits in the wings.

Cornthwaite has a remarkable face. His eyes peer out of deep valleys; the shadows on his cheeks are magnified by Paulie Jenkins’ astute lighting design. It would be easy to feel too much sympathy for such an expressive visage, but Cornthwaite keeps Davies’ gaze cold, his bigotry hot and his whining transparent.

In the play’s funniest moments, Davies tries to milk the kindness of strangers. But he will never entirely depend on it. He knows that strangers can be . . . strange. Certainly these two brothers are.

Aston, we learn, is a veteran of shock treatments. So Lancaster, appropriately enough, often reacts a moment or two behind the beat, endowing the famous Pinter pauses with meaning. He walks with a slight stoop; the sleeves of his drab little suit (designer: Shigeru Yaji) are always riding up on his arms.

But the saving grace of Lancaster’s performance is that his face is more than a blinking “vacancy” sign. Underneath, we catch aching glimpses of the fundamental vulnerability that’s missing in Cornthwaite’s look. It’s enough to carry us through his agonizing monologue about his hospitalization.

As Mick, Harrison also does as much with his eyes and stance as with his lines. His piercing stare takes no quarter. His smile is toxic. Still, his power is slightly diluted by two odd choices.

In a scene where Mick pursues Davies around a dark room with a vacuum cleaner, we don’t hear the hum of the appliance itself, as indicated in the script, but rather the sound of Mick imitating the appliance. It’s not nearly as foreboding. And at the end, when Mick “begins to speak” to his brother, Harrison makes too much of it, uttering an indecipherable noise that sounds like poor articulation on the actor’s part instead of an almost-spoken sentiment from the character.

These little moments don’t matter much, though. The comedy, the mystery and most of the menace are here. True, this is a small-scaled, three-hour play with a late curtain time--theatergoers should prepare for it accordingly. But Marcus keeps a watchful eye on the play’s speedometer, and the rewards are ample for alert audiences.

But back to that initial question: Why now ? Because the specter of homelessness is acute for many Americans. Because the “co-dependency” movement has made so many inroads into people’s perceptions of each other; caretakers are now widely seen as care-makers. Because the planet seems as cluttered as this Cliff Faulkner-designed room.

Any of these reverberations from “The Caretaker” is plausible. None of them is necessary. Regardless of your personal theories, Marcus makes sure that “The Caretaker” keeps on ticking.

‘The Caretaker’

Tom Harrison: Mick

James Lancaster: Aston

Robert Cornthwaite: Davies

By Harold Pinter. Directed by Paul Marcus. Set by Cliff Faulkner. Lights by Paulie Jenkins. Costumes by Shigeru Yaji. Sound by Michael Roth. Production manager Edward Lapine. Stage manager Andy Tighe.