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

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 in for a "sit down":

Davies: Sit down? Huh . . . I haven't had a good sit down . . . I haven't had a proper sit down . . . well, I couldn't tell you. . . . Ten minutes off for tea-break in the middle of the night in that place and I couldn't find a seat, not one. All them Greeks had it, Poles, Greeks, Blacks, the lot of them, all them aliens had it.

What those "aliens" had isn't quite clear, but never mind. Aston takes Davies's endless rambling as a matter of course: people speak to him and he listens, although he's never entirely sure what language, let alone conversation, is meant to produce. A connection? An exchange of ideas? Of hope?

He offers Davies a place to sleep, and the next morning, after he has gone out, Mick appears and pins the groggy old man to the floor. "I hope you slept well last night," he says, taunting him. Mick is turned on by the vulnerability of his prey, but he has no interest in doing permanent damage to Davies. After all, if he killed him, he'd be fatherless again. For what "The Caretaker" is about--what the title implies--is the arrival of Daddy, the man who protects and instructs and serves as a role model for his boys. It's as if Aston and Mick had been waiting for Davies all their lives. When Aston asks him to stay on as the building's caretaker, he's handing the old man the keys to their souls, inviting him to mend the cracked minds and howling hearts of his adopted children.

No other contemporary playwright has explored the nasty ways in which fathers and sons construct each other--and then smash the models--with such vibrancy and intellectual perspicacity. "The Caretaker" was Pinter's fourth full-length play to be staged. (He was twenty-nine when it was first produced, in London in 1960.) With it, he established himself as a powerful force in the British theatre. He offered an alternative to the kitchen-sink drama, which critics and audiences had come to accept as the only version of reality. (One of the many props here, in a fantastic set by John Lee Beatty, is an unused and cumbersome kitchen sink.) Pinter's work was, instead, an exploration of the nightmare landscape of the mind--the mind that lies to itself about what is real and tries to reshape the world around it. Pinter described the inner life of the colonialist without an empire.

Pinter wrote his early plays while touring the provinces as an actor. Attuned to the absurd and absurdist tales he picked up on the road--the emotional connections missed in a shabby teahouse; the dank wooden stairs that creak under the weight of the suspicious landlady as she eyes life through her tenants' keyholes--he later incorporated these memories into his work, adding to them his genius for delineating the political without becoming ideological. Structurally, he borrowed from Beckett, whose prose the younger playwright ...