The Caretaker at BAM

photo: Shane Reid

If we forget chronology than the first line of Waiting For Godot, (l949) “Nothing to be done,” is proleptic in that it anticipates the question which constitutes one of the last lines of The Caretaker (1960), “What am I going to do?” Rain is hitting the skylight or dripping in to a pail from a leak in the roof or there is the Doppler effect as trains depart the current phenomenology themed production of Pinter’s play at BAM. There are also menacing sounding footsteps coming up to or descending the stairs from the disheveled room in which the action takes place. Actually that room as conceived by Christopher Morahan with set design by Eileen Diss is less an example of the absurdism with which Pinter is sometimes associated than pure naturalism. Architectural Digest could do a piece on the décor with its piles of tied up newspapers, its Buddha,which is eventually shattered, and its two cots. It’s also Empire of the Sun’s warehouse of plundered colonial antiques on a more personal scale. You are familiar with this room even though it’s supposed to be the end of the world. “The name I’m going under now is not my real name,” Davies, Pinter's prime mover, says at one point. “It’s assumed.” Nothing is authentic and that’s the point made by Jonathan Pryce in his arch and urgent interpretation of the role. Davies aka Jenkins is hired to be the caretaker. He only knows that caretaking requires implements. He is also hired to be an interior and exterior designer, but when confronted with the job description he pleads ignorance and then admits to being an imposter. Heidegger said that human beings live an inauthentic existence to the extent that they are not aware of death. Can we assume that this absence may explain the disarray? Is this the absence explains the faulty connections: the fact that there is no time in the room, that brown shoelaces are offered for black shoes, that the elder of two brothers Aston (Alan Cox), who inhabits the room, renders a whole soliloquy about a stay in a mental institution that's supposedly not listened to though it’s reiterated practically verbatim by Davies--a character who also groans in the night, but doesn’t dream, a character who is given somebody else’s piece of luggage when his is taken by accident?

L'Age d'Or

Even the stage sets of the famous ‘50s Lone Ranger TV series were primitive. The Lone Ranger and Tonto always seemed to arrive at the same mountain pass, with the same pair of boulders that looked a little worse for the wear. In essence, neither the Lone Ranger nor Tonto were going anywhere. They were not what today would be called socially mobile, either as fictional characters or as beneficiaries of the myth of the Wild West.

   

Let’s turn to another classic, The Life of Riley, with the all-but-forgotten William Bendix in the title role. The protagonist works in an aeronautics factory and carries one of those lunch boxes that look like a miniature airplane hanger. Looming in the background is the post-war prosperity of Imperial America. Riley works on an assembly line, but lives in a cheery split-level house with flower boxes on the window-sills. There is something value-free about his occupation. Though the series was made in the post-war period, plants that made aircraft consumed the war economy of the previous decade. The Life of Riley is the lighter side of the project. Riley bears no responsibility for the finished product or the murder that his productivity wreaks. He is merely a cog, taking orders from his superiors. He exemplifies the early Marx papers of 1848, with their emphasis on the alienation of the worker caused by two premises of capitalist production—division of labor and economies of scale. Yet he is as happy as a bird.

   

Exhibit three: The Honeymooners. Ralph Kramden is a New York City bus driver who lives in a tenement where the fire escape is as constant a part of the set as the boulders in The Lone Ranger. He has argumentative relationships with his wife Alice, his best friend Norton, and Norton’s wife Trixy. In the lingo of our current culture, Ralph and Alice would be described as a dysfunctional family, in which the wife parries an ever-increasing crescendo of insults from her sadistic husband. If Ralph’s rage were to cross the line from verbal to physical, he could easily be placed in the Joel Steinberg category, as his insults and character assassination are remorseless, unrelenting, and fundamentally aimed at extinguishing the will and identities of those closest to him.

   

The Golden Age of Television unwittingly echoed the Theater of the Absurd—epitomized by Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter—and it’s not hard to imagine scripts for The Lone Ranger, The Life of Riley, or The Honeymooners being performed in the tiny Théâtre de la Huchette, where Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson have played in repertory since 1957. The spare, unchanging sets, the opaque humor of the dialogue, with its barely repressed violence, and the droning sense of time could easily turn the scripts for these popular ‘50s television series into the basis for a new avant-garde theater movement, which could be named after Buñuel’s famed surrealist masterpiece, L’Age d’Or.