Introduction

Project Timeline

Techniques and Styles in The Caretaker

Who is the Caretaker?

In a December 1971 interview, Mel Gussow an eminent critic for the New York Times, asked ‘Who is Harold Pinter?’, Pinter replied ‘He’s not me. He’s someone else's creation’. A curious answer one might think, but at this point Pinter had been battling against being pigeon holed in his own reputation for thirteen years.

The distinct style of Pinter’s writing has encouraged both early and more recent critics to try and formulate northing less than a ‘Pinter’ theory to approaching his work – pause + failure to communicate + a threat shrouded in everyday speech = wham bam wallop Harold Pinter’s work. This formula, this idea has been neatly wrapped up in the adjective Pinteresque, which entered the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1960s.

Margaret Atwood, for whom Pinter adapted The Handmaid’s Tale for film in an 1987, attempted to define Pinter’s style, and specifically the adjective Pinteresque in article for ‘Pinter Review: Collected Essays 1999 – 2000’ as follows:

Atwood’s poetic description encompasses the sense of mood that permeates off works such as The Caretaker, The Birthday Party and The Room, and that has contributed to the creation of the adjective Pinteresque.

Indeed, Pinteresque does encompass strong elements of Pinter’s style, but Pinter’s work is more than that, and Pinter has found those trying to define his work so clearly and neatly, hampering to his creative freedom. In an interview to Kate Turner of the Sunday Times, Pinter remembers reading in a Sunday paper that a speech in The Caretaker didn’t belong in a Pinter play, Pinter’s reaction to such criticism was violent:

Pinter’s frustration can be felt exploding off the page; from this passage it is clear that Pinter finds the notion of a ‘Pinter’ play or style creatively strangling. Furthermore Pinter believes that the writing he has produced when he finds himself slipping into the ‘Pinter’ formula has been ‘the worst thing I’ve written. The words and ideas had become automatic and redundant’ . Pinter sees the ‘Pinter’ persona that has been created by practitioners and critics as a quite exhausting addition to being a successful artist, forced upon him and quite apart from himself as an individual or artist – indeed in an interview for The New Theatre Magazine he cried ‘Harold Pinter sits on my damn back’!

Although Pinter as a younger man appears to have struggled with the ‘Harold Pinter’ persona and style, his house now contains several shelves of literature about him and his works. In a 2004 interview with Mark Batty, Pinter confesses to deriving a ‘certain kind of pleasure that they [the books] exist, and that people are bothering to write about my work, all these people’, but even as Pinter shares this pleasure with us, he counters it, by stating that their presence can also be ‘suffocating’, a feeling he has been experiencing for over four decades.

However, it is from his distinct style and skill that Pinter’s success has come and that he has managed to carve such an expansive and varied career. Pinter began writing plays in 1957, following a career as an actor touring repertory theatres in England and Ireland. As well as acting, Pinter had been was very much engaged in writing poetry, but as Pinter himself stated ‘You couldn’t possibly live off poetry’.

Although Pinter had an agent, Michael Codron, in the first few years of his career, Pinter was writing plays with no real conception of when or where they would be staged, and the initial cold reception that The Birthday Party was greeted with did nothing to add to the uncertainty. The uncertainty and financial issues cause by this uncertainty around writing plays for the stage are key reasons why in 1960 Pinter attended a meeting with Peter Willis, Head of Drama at Associated Rediffusion, and began an active career in writing for the television between 1960 -1965. Here Pinter recollects that initial meeting with Peter Willis:

Those three plays were The Lovers, The Collection and Night School; with the broadcasting of these three plays and the resounding success of The Caretaker, as a stage play, television play and film, in the early 1960’s Pinter’s unique writing style was stamped across the nation, and it is hardly surprising that with such success the persona and knowledge of his style grew into the adjective ‘Pinteresque’ and the 'Harold Pinter' he feels that he has been carrying on his ‘damn back’ ever since.

Harold Pinter does not write for his audience, he does not chase super star status and has no desire to give the audience what they would like, want or expect from him in a play. This does not mean that Pinter is a reclusive hermit who shies away from interviews or public debate. Indeed since Pinter’s first published interview in 1959, he has had in excess of seventy dialogues printed, taken part in over fourty radio and television interviews and countless live talks, not least his world famous Nobel prize winning speech in December 2005. But although he recognises that his writing, particularly his writing for the theatre, will become a very public activity, he doesn’t write with that in mind, instead he views the process of writing as an extremely private activity.

In a speech made by Harold Pinter at the National Student Drama Festival in 1962, Pinter highlighted this contradiction ‘The theatre is a large, energetic, public activity. Writing is, for me, a completely private activity, poem or a play, no difference.’ Pinter goes further to state that when writing a play, he views his responsibility ‘not to the audiences, critics, produces, directors or to his fellow man in general, but to the play in hand, simply’, Pinter has no desire to be loved by his audiences or to use his works in order to ingratiate himself; his concern, his pre-occupation is ensuring that his work remains true. He does not write with his audiences in mind. This attitude, this belief is one that Pinter has carried through to the rehearsal room both as an actor and a director; we can see his attitude permeating through in his advice to actors performing his work:

Sarah Clough, Education Officer,
Creative Development Programme