Theatre reviews: The Caretaker | Suddenly Last Summer | Like the Rain

Published on Thursday 6 November 2008 18:51

THE CARETAKER **** CITIZENS THEATRE, GLASGOW SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER *** LIKE THE RAIN **** TRON THEATRE, GLASGOW

THE art of making classic texts live again for a modern audience is a mysterious one, but Phillip Breen's fine new Citizens Theatre production of Harold Pinter's 1960 classic, The Caretaker, offers a masterclass in at least one way of doing it.

Outwardly, there's nothing remotely radical about Breen's approach. Max Jones's set – deliberately placed in a long, low slightly skewed slice of the Citz's big stage – offers a classic vision of the squalid, cluttered and comfortless attic bedsit, in a half-derelict house somewhere in post-war London, where the quiet, damaged but kindly Aston offers a bed for the night to the appalling old tramp Davies, dirty, opportunistic, ungrateful, but endlessly articulate.

When it comes to the deep interaction between Aston, Davies, and Aston's wide-boy brother Mick, though, this production offers a powerful, distinctive vision of the play, and one with some fierce contemporary echoes.

It's always been clear that, at one level at least, the three characters represent different aspects of Britain's class structure. Davies is shiftless, smelly, unattractive and deeply racist; but he lives at the sharp end of British society, competing for menial low-wage jobs with the rest of London's transient population, including Scots, Irish, Welsh and the "blacks", whom he views with superstitious horror. Aston is well-behaved, neat, inoffensive, undemanding, dependent on Mick for bed and board, the very image of unquestioning middle-class obedience. And Mick is usually played as a pushy representative of an emerging nouveau-riche boss-class, obsessed with property development, and the turning of a fast buck.

In Breen's production, though, Eugene O'Hare's Mick is something else – a thug who has acquired the slicked-back hair, posh accent and charming veneer of a bullying public schoolboy, and who often looks alarmingly like one of those Bullingdon club types currently dominating the shadow Cabinet. And in a flash, this steely reinterpretation opens the play up to a whole new set of reflections on the real nature of power and class in Britain, as a society in which the most brutal forms of power often come cloaked in the perfect manners of a well-trained ruling class, and in which that class demonstrates a positive genius for co-opting and domesticating each new generation of commercially successful boot-boys.

The production is not flawless. Tam Dean Burn's Davies starts brilliantly, but eventually becomes locked into a set of Fagin-like mannerisms, from which Breen should have offered him an exit route. Robert Hastie's Aston, though, is a magnificent representation of helpless, innocuous middle-class kindliness; a figure straight out of TS Eliot, in a neat car coat and slightly too-short trousers. And I've rarely seen the three-way interaction among the characters played with such an intense and driving sense of significance; or with so many powerful echoes of that other great tramp drama of the post-war age, Waiting For Godot, here given Pinter's distinct and hard-edged British twist.

In Glasgow, meanwhile, this year's Glasgay! festival powers to a conclusion with the final performances at the Tron of Andy Arnold's thoughtful Tennessee Williams double bill, which pairs Williams's tense 1958 single-act drama Suddenly Last Summer with three short plays set among the prostitutes, dreamers and unloved children of mid-20th century America, gathered under the title Like The Rain.

Suddenly Last Summer famously tells the story of a ageing New Orleans dowager, Violet Venable, and her titanic last-ditch struggle – using all her wealth, and force of character– to suppress the truth about the violent death of her adored son Sebastian, torn apart in a Mediterranean holiday resort by local boys after prostituting them for sex then abruptly withdrawing his favours.

Her enemy is her niece, Catharine, the only witness to Sebastian's death, who has been held in an upmarket mental hospital ever since she first tried to tell the true story; and their confrontation is explosive, containing in a single New Orleans garden room the whole history of the suppression of homosexual lives and narratives in western culture.

Arnold's production, however, seems strangely muted and ill at ease, held in check by a ferocious wicked-lady performance from Morag Stark, as Violet, that never varies in tone, and is far too unsympathetic to be interesting. Claire Yuill's Catharine is fascinating – by turns fragile, frenzied, and startlingly courageous. But in the end, neither she nor Ross Stenhouse, in the key role of the doctor, can do much to restore the dramatic rhythm of a production that captures all the fierce repressive violence of the old southern culture Violet represents, but never even begins to suggest its seductive charm.

Upstairs in the Changing House studio, though, Arnold – with designer Kirsty McCabe and sound man Steven Bain – finds exactly the right dreamy jazz-blues tone for Like The Rain, three richly poetic Williams meditations about the lives of those 20th century people on the very edge of society and survival.

Muireann Kelly is magnificent as the dying prostitute in Hello From Bertha, breathing her bad-tempered and utterly pitiful last in a bed which her brothel madam urgently needs for other purposes; and Yuill is disturbingly poignant as the sexually abused, lost girl-child skipping on a railway line in This Property Is Condemned.

And in Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen, Anita Vettesse gives an unforgettable, haunting performance as an exhausted city woman with a vision of a life lived alone and in perfect tranquillity, somewhere on a sea coast drenched in perpetual rain; but drawn back again into the clutching, demanding arms of her lover, and into the brief, hot, grasping rush of life itself.

&149 The Caretaker runs until 15 November; Suddenly Last Summer and Like The Rain until tomorrow.