OnStage: Pinter, off-kilter

"Out of a scabrous derelict and two mentally unbalanced brothers, Harold Pinter has woven a play of strangely compelling beauty and passion. 'The Caretaker' ... proclaims its young English author as one of the important playwrights of our day."

Thus begins Howard Taubman's Oct. 5, 1961, review in the New York Times of the Broadway premiere of Pinter's first big hit and second full-length play. (Pinter's first play, the 1958 work "The Birthday Party," closed on London's West End after just a week of performances.)

Pinter went on to write "The Homecoming," "Betrayal" and "Ashes to Ashes," among other plays. And he influenced a generation of playwrights who found humor and wit in a compressed poetry that includes silences. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 2005, his name had been made into an adjective, with "Pinteresque" referring to the menace and volatile power struggle over language that characterizes so many of his plays. The adjective also refers to that obsession of postmodernism: the elusiveness of meaning.

"Caretaker," whose Broadway revival five years ago was headlined by Patrick Stewart and which previews Saturday at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, has all those Pinteresque elements.

The play centers on the fluid relationship of two brothers, Aston and Mick, who live together in a London flat. They are joined by a tramp, Davies, who seeks a place in their household and insinuates his way into their relationship. The piece, full of pauses, develops into a power struggle about competing realities.

"Although it can be disorienting and dizzying, it's not a play meant to simply bewilder you," said director Benjamin McGovern. "It is a comedy, after all, and even if it's creepy, there's a lot to laugh about."

Inspired by Beckett

Pinter was mentored and deeply influenced by absurdist master Samuel Beckett, whose "Waiting for Godot" is often considered the model for "Caretaker." But whereas "Godot" offers itself up as a welter of metaphors and symbols -- quicksand would be a relatively firm foundation for "Godot" -- "Caretaker" is anchored in a concrete reality, said McGovern.

"You can see shades of Beckett in this play, for sure, in his use of a language of poetic reality to get to the truth," he said. "But the men live in a house in London. They speak a very specific English idiom. These characters are not archetypes. They are much more grounded."

Even so, it has not stopped scholars and critics from reading all kinds of metaphors into Aston, Mick and Davies, played at the Guthrie by Kris Nelson, Stephen Cartmell and Steven Epp, respectively. Some glosses have it that these men represent the holy trinity, or the ego, superego and id. But Pinter has maintained that these off-kilter characters are what they are, and nothing more.

McGovern said that during the rehearsal process, he made some startling discoveries about the text, insights both maddening and thrilling.

"The experience of rehearsing it is similar to the experience of seeing the play," McGovern said. "When you think one thing is happening, you realize that it's something else. It takes these sorts of twists where conflicts and alliances, the status of the characters suddenly shift, but almost imperceptibly. What is being said leads us to believe one thing is happening but we realize that something is going underneath that. As we open that, we find another layer underneath it."

In the end, McGovern concedes that there is no right way to read the play.

"Anything you take away from it is correct," he said. "The point is not to get too concerned about not understanding where Pinter might be leading us. The point is that he's got us thinking."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390