The Caretaker

Gate regulars Marty Rea and Garrett Lombard are joined by Michael Feast for a rendition of Harold Pinter’s breakthrough play.

An unnamed figure enters a ramshackle room and sits, looking around him with disfavour before leaving. Two other men then enter the room, one obviously proprietary towards it. And so begins the archetypal Pinterian battle for control of a space. Aston (Marty Rea) is the man at home in this disaster of a living space, who has, as a kindly gesture, invited in Michael Feast’s tramp Jenkins, or is it Davies? Davies is as garrulous as Aston is taciturn, and after some hesitation makes himself at home; even carping about the draught from a window next to the spare bed. But he soon finds himself left at a loss by the arrival of the first man we saw – Mick (Garrett Lombard), who actually owns this decrepit London house, is suspicious of Davies’s motives, and interrogates him with rapid-fire repeated questions.

Director Toby Frow lets the action unfurl at slightly too slow a pace initially, but when Mick and Davies meet sparks begin to fly. Lombard is vividly vicious as the game-playing teddy-boy, his harassment of Davies pure Pinter. And that’s before he turns the tables on Davies later with a magnificently indignant and absurd riff on interior decorating. Feast is tremendously nimble as Davies. Wheedling, whining, conniving, charming, he contradicts himself on a sixpence if he thinks there might be advantage to it. And he suspects that there might be considerable advantage in driving a wedge between the two brothers. Mick owns the house, and Aston is meant to be restoring it, but he makes no progress, obsessing over tools. Aston offers Davies the job of caretaker, but Davies, anticipating Pinter’s 1963 screenplay The Servant, has his sights set higher.

But in Pinter’s world, outlined by Davies in a speech about Aston, nothing is as it seems… Francis O’Connor’s set assembles a mighty amount of useful junk which Aston will never use, while rafters shoot out above the audience. Aston saved Davies from a cafe dust-up, but Davies is unnerved by Aston’s lengthy monologue about how his odd ideas got him electro-shock therapy. Now his broken gait keeps pace with his slow-moving ideas, and Mark Jonathan’s lights dim to just a spot on a mesmerising Rea as he trails away. Now all he has is an ambition to build a shed, which would be the starting point for restoring the house. But the grasping Davies is equally deluded; his refrain about his papers being in Sidcup, where he’ll never go, eventually renders Sidcup as illusory as Moscow in Three Sisters.

Pinter’s landscape of overt menace and covert battles for dominance hidden in subtexts and non-sequitirs can be deathly when played too slow, but once they get going these three actors traverse that landscape artfully.

3.5/5

The Caretaker continues its run at the Gate until the 21^st of March.

Close-up: Iconic Film Images from Susan Wood

An exhibition of work by New York photographer Susan Wood is now open until the 22^nd of February in the Irish Georgian Society’s City Assembly House on South William Street, and Wood will give a free admission lunchtime talk about her life and work on Friday 14^th February at 1pm.

Close-up is part of the JDIFF programme and is a collection of iconic 1960s film images from movies including Leo the Last and Easy Rider, representing milestones in American photography over a period of more than thirty years. Under contract to Paramount Pictures, United Artists and 20th Century Fox, Wood’s assignments allowed her to capture remarkable, unrehearsed shots of some of the era’s most unforgettable personalities – Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Monica Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni, Billie Whitelaw, John Wayne, Billy Wilder, and Joseph Losey. The pictures are on display as a group in this exhibition for the first time ever. Wood’s editorial, advertising, and fashion photography has appeared in Look, Vogue, People and The New York Times and she is known for her portraits of John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Susan Sontag, and John Updike. A founding member of the Women’s Forum, Wood was friends with many of the vanguard of the feminist movement, including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. This exhibition, presented with the Irish Georgian Society, has been curated by Irish photographer Deirdre Brennan, who has worked with Wood’s archive for the past decade. Wood says “I am thrilled that these photographs, lovingly curated by Deirdre Brennan, will be seen together for the first time in Dublin and I’m honoured to be one of the first artists to exhibit in this wonderful new space at the Irish Georgian Society.”

Wood is the winner of many Art Director and Clio awards, and her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Throughout the 1970s and 80s she was a regular contributor to New York magazine, and did a notable cover story on John Lennon & Yoko Ono for Look. Mademoiselle her as one of their ‘10 Women Of The Year’ in 1961, and she went on to interview and photograph Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer, as well as delve into investigative reporting for the celebrated New York magazine expose of medical malfeasance, “Dr. Feelgood”. She is the co-author of Hampton Style (1992), a Literary Guild selection, for which she took over 250 original photographs of houses and gardens on the East End of Long Island. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Yale School of Art, her work is in the Library of Congress and her own website www.susanwood.net.

Brennan is an NCAD graduate who worked as a photojournalist and documentary photographer in New York for over a decade before returning to Dublin in 2008. On contract with The New York Times since 2000, her work has been published throughout the world in Newsweek, Marie Claire, The Smithsonian and the Sunday Times. Brennan is currently working on a photo documentary entitled Ulysses Map of Dublin, utilising the map and structure of James Joyce’s novel to consider politics, race and class in the modern capital. She has been a member of New York’s Redux Picture Agency since 2000. (Seewww.deirdrebrennan.com)