A room in a house in West London

Without wishing to get wrapped up in the peripheral, I seem to remember three sound cues for drips into a bucket in Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker. My memory of this comes packaged with a certain amount of affection for Pinter the playwright because it was once my job, as light and sound manager at the English Theatre of Hamburg, to deliver this sound effect nightly for three months, beginning with the play’s Hamburg premiere on 14 September 1989. The technology was basic: A cassette player connected to the house stereo system. The cassette had to be cued-up manually, using a pencil to turn the reels. Inevitably, on some nights, one of the three drips would be clipped, or disappear entirely, and the actors shot nervous glances around the stage and glowered at me in the tiny box above the auditorium. It seemed suitably Pinteresque.

The theatre management cast professional British actors in all of its plays, and they were flown in for the season to perform them in English. I still have the theatre programme, and love Pinter’s description:

“Setting: A room in a house in West London
Time: The present
Act One: A night in winter
Act Two: A few seconds later
Act Three: A fortnight later. Afternoon”

Anthony Taylor played Mick in the Hamburg production, and he was the star of the show. His electro-shock therapy speech, which closes Act Two, captivated me every night. Even during the matinees, when the audience consisted chiefly of rowdy German schoolchildren who probably didn’t understand a word of Pinter’s groundbreaking masterpiece, the intensity of his lines rarely failed to hush the auditorium.

Commenting on The Caretaker, Patricia Hern once said:

“The term ‘Pinteresque’ describes a style of play-writing where the dialogue appears to use the clichés and patterns of everyday conversation to express a darker sense of man’s insecurity, aggressiveness or hypocrisy.”

The 1985 film of Russell Hoban’s novel Turtle Diary had a screenplay by Pinter, who also put in a cameo appearance as a man in a bookshop. There has, of course, been some discussion of Pinter’s win at The Kraken, the Russell Hoban newsgroup. Hoban is famously dissatisfied with Pinter’s treatment of his book, complaining he took out all the Hoban business and replaced it with Pinter business. Some Hoban commentators agree. Here’s Christine Wilkie, in Through The Narrow Gate (The Mythological Consciousness of Russell Hoban):

“Pinter has made some dramatic omissions and inclusions that make the film have little bearing upon the novel’s significance.”

Nevertheless, Turtle Diary remains a charming film, and I think Pinter appreciated the book’s subtext rather better than his critics (including Hoban) have suggested.

Me, I’ll never forget the English Theatre of Hamburg’s production of The Caretaker for its uncomfortable silences; the cast’s rendering of Pinter’s mannered dialogue, carefully avoiding communication just as some of us do in real life; Mick’s violent memories of electro-shock therapy; and the sound of fake water, echoing from a bucket.

Drip.