SONS AND LOVERS.('The Caretaker,' American Airlines theater, London, England)(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 17-NOV-03

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Mick (Aidan Gillen) has a body like a switchblade--always ready to spring into action and respond to violence with violence. In a leather jacket as black as his brilliantined hair, Mick is a neat, presentable sociopath. When the world around him is still, his face goes slack and his hands hang at his sides. He doesn't know what to do with himself without conflict--his aphrodisiac. The year: 1960. Mick and his brother, Aston (Kyle MacLachlan), live in a house in West London, sharing a room that's a kind of junk heap, filled with paint buckets and chandeliers and dusty rugs--signs of domesticity gone awry. Aston, unlike Mick, doesn't cultivate violence. Instead, he moves with the slow deliberateness of someone who fully intends to put his affairs in order; it's just that he can't keep up with all the things that need doing--he's too busy watching the dust motes circle.

By all outward appearances, the brothers in Harold Pinter's mysterious and moving early play "The Caretaker" (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines) seem orphaned, spiritually and otherwise. Then Aston introduces a third figure into this menagerie of fraternal brutality and apathy: an old drifter called Davies (Patrick Stewart). At the beginning of the play, Aston invites Davies...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.