Pinter rewards patience

By LINDA HERRICK

Back in February, a trio of actors were sweating it out rehearsing for Harold Pinter's psychological power-game drama The Caretaker. Just like the hopes and dreams of Pinter's deluded characters, it was not to be.

Production stopped when veteran actor Norman Forsey, who was to play the tramp Davies, fell seriously ill and had to withdraw.

For a time, the remaining team - Michael Lawrence, David Aston and director Paul Gittins - battled on. Lawrence, who'd been rehearsing as younger brother Mick, moved into Forsey's shoes, Aston stayed on as elder brother Aston (a role he was born to play, you could say) and Ray Trickett attempted Mick's character.

Confused? So were they. The production, postponed for a week, was cancelled.

"When it was first pulled down, Paul Minifie [Maidment director] offered us another space at the theatre and we thought we'd have a go again," says Lawrence.

"We got into the theatre and with me taking on the role of the tramp, it wasn't so bad for me because I knew the part but for Ray, coming in totally cold into my role - we both felt we weren't going to get there. The script is so precise there was no point in doing it."

So it was curtains for The Caretaker, temporarily at least. But as any student of Pinter will know, the English playwright rewards patience, and so now Davies, Mick and Aston are finally back, opening tonight at the Maidment Studio, with the same production team, except Edward Newborn, who replaces Forsey.

Newborn has worked in theatre around New Zealand for many years, and has also had stints on the usual suspects: Hercules, Xena, Shortland Street and City Life.

The role of Davies, however, is a different kettle of psychoses. Davies is the passive-aggressive homeless interloper into the rundown "home" Aston is supposed to be renovating for his more worldly brother Mick.

Aston is hopeless, a sagging wreck of a man ruined by shock treatment in a mental hospital, and with no ambition beyond perhaps, one day, building a shed in the backyard.

Davies thinks he's in with a chance, to get a permanent roof over his head, if he can ingratiate himself first with one brother - or maybe the other. And so the games begin ...

Lawrence reckons Davies - the caretaker - "is much harder than Hamlet or Macbeth or any of those big tragic roles" - and many critics would agree. The Guardian's redoubtable Michael Billington studied Davies in a revival of the work, starring Donald Pleasance, Colin Firth and Peter Howitt, and thought: "In this least sentimental of plays, you should never feel sorry, as you do here, for this manipulative old hobo".

Lawrence agrees. Davies is one of those people you just can't like. "You've got to find that street cunning which is quite transparent. He says, 'yes, mister, thanks very much, mister' and the next thing is, he's an asshole. He lives for himself and has done so for 20 years. He is basically grabbing what he can but Mick is like a cat playing with a mouse - Davies."

Lawrence is mad for Pinter, and has been since he was introduced to his work when he played in a Mercury Theatre staging of The Homecoming, alongside George Henare, Elizabeth Hawthorne and Ross Duncan; Paul Minifie directed.

"That's when I first came across him [Pinter] and with all the pauses and underlying dialogue that doesn't get said. I found that really interesting."

So much so, that Lawrence has directed and starred in quite a few Pinters in Auckland over the past decade or so; most recently, Old Times, with Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Theresa Healey.

He set up a company (potent pause) Productions specifically to bring Pinter to the stage; as already noted, the "potent pause" is a reference to the writer's attention to silence as a significant form of communication. Subtlety is also a key.

Billington has said that "Pinter is a master of the pisstake as an instrument of power", in this case, in the hands of Davies, then Mick, but Lawrence believes the actors must take care not to topple over into caricature.

That's also why, now, he is so relieved the February production was cancelled.

"We are trying to play it subtly. [Director] Paul Gittins is very much a guy who doesn't like things over the top so we are trying to get inside the life of it. But it is a really complicated piece. We build on it all the time, we get lost, we think we've got on to something, then it goes out the window.

"This is why we cancelled it, we wouldn't have been anywhere near it. We would have done no justice to the piece and we would have been ashamed of ourselves.

"Pinter is so precise. You don't have to follow his stage directions but it can be really good by just following his punctuation, his wording - he's got a reason for each thing he writes in there.

"Each production can be totally different as long as you honour the language - that's what I find fascinating."

On stage

*What: The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter

*Where and when: Maidment Studio, June 9-20