Caretaker (The Caretaker)

Sitting in a packed Gyan Mancha auditorium in Kolkata as Harold Pinter’s work made a comeback in Bengali theater, I was transported to a similar evening two decades ago when soon after his Nobel Prize–winning (2005) The Homecoming was staged at the same venue in English. There have been very few Pinter productions in Bengali theater. Directed by Arindam Mukherjee and Madhurima Goswami and produced by Anya Theater, Caretaker (the definite article dropped from the English title to make it sound colloquial in Bangla) breaks that 20-year silence. The production has a stellar cast with two of the finest contemporary Bengali theater and film actors—Anirban Chakrabarti and Debesh Roy Chowdhuri—essaying Aston (changed to Shankar) and Davies (changed to Adhir) and Tathagata Chowdhury playing Mick, in this version Shankar’s younger brother Tegra. The translation of the play, uncredited in the production brochure, is faithful to the original and makes changes to the names of persons and places to make the play relatable to a Bengali audience.Notable features of the translation are the replacement of Pinter’s use of “Blacks,” “Greeks,” and “Poles” in Davies’ (Adhir’s) initial speech in Act One, with the non-Bengali Indian ethnic groups “Odias” and “Marwaris” as Adhir’s social abusers and the substitution of “Marathi” for Black neighbors, who are seen with racist suspicion by Adhir. In the English-language original, Aston contrasts Davies’s racist fear with his quiet disbelief. In this production, however, Shankar (Aston) does not perform that counter-voice. This change gives the ethno-racial profiling in Pinter’s original a politically problematic free reign in the Bengali production. Instead of Aston asking Davies if he is Welsh, Shankar asks Adhir if he is from Sylhet—a city in Bangladesh. And instead of Sidcup, Adhir indicates that his identity document is being kept by someone in Dholdighi.These ethno-national identitarian associations indicate the ways the cultural translation locates the play and its tramp motif in a South Asian context. The change of context is British India’s Partition in 1947, which caused the formation of India and Pakistan as two states, and the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, which led to that nation’s independence and its renaming from East Pakistan to Bangladesh. In both these political events, the refugee crisis was a discernible reality. The Bengali translation of The Caretaker introduces this postcolonial history to give the play a new political background. The recurrent evocations of Adhir’s unavailable identity papers create another political resonance, once posited against the backdrop of the National Register of Citizens, recently revived by the Indian state through the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act. The revival has raised concerns about the presence of systematic identity documents of several people who may have arrived in India from 1947 all the way to the 1970s after the Bangladesh war. These local colors revitalize The Caretaker, as often happens in theater’s ability to become contemporary without extreme effort.Apart from the changes discussed above, the production is generally loyal to Pinter’s original text. For example, both the laughing Buddha statuette and the bucket hanging from the ceiling are intact in the list of famous props. The disheveled room in which Aston tries to fix his toaster and dreams of building a shed in the garden; Mick, Aston, and Davies’s pantomime with Davies’s bag in Act 2; the rain outside; Aston’s deep sense of void; Mick’s flippancy; the tragi-comic reversals of power among the three characters—all these elements create a world that closely approximates the world in Pinter’s English version. There is, however, a subtle difference in the ending. Both brothers appear together in the final scene, suggesting a sinister pact by which they deprive Adhir of the job as caretaker they had promised him. This change to Pinter’s original suggests an interpretation that makes the play less enigmatic and therefore less Pinteresque. In the original, there is no clarity about Aston and Mick hatching a joint plot against Davies. One could even argue that the lack of clarity on this point in the original adds to Pinter’s commentary on the casual nature of everyday cruelty. The Bengali production seems to suggest a more palpable fraternal conspiracy against the tramp.The production is also un-Pinteresque in its pitch. The director decides to play Pinter with sentimentalism, almost like melodrama. The Pinter pause and the dark comedy are mostly missing. Slapstick dominates the comedic discourse far too much! The problem with playing Pinter in this tonality is that it takes away from Pinter’s usual insistence on the lack of “drama” in his theater. Like Chekhov, Pinter is the master of a theater that goes against the hyper-dramatic moments of life. His theater is not about big events but rather small events and everyday nuances. Though the production brochure acknowledges that The Caretaker is “dialogue-dependent” (translation mine), the Bengali production and performances do not bring out the drama of the nondramatic or the theater of trivialities that Pinter’s dialogues so competently enact (Caretaker’s Production Brochure, n.p.)!Instead of capitalizing on subtext, Debesh (as Adhir) employs occasional physical movements but mostly a verbal style that borders on loudness, involving, for example, excessive panting. The actor’s performance hits the right note when Adhir becomes manipulative, but his efforts to control Tegra (Mick) and humiliate Shankar (Aston) seem to be extensions of his own vulnerability. Tathagata’s Tegra amplifies Mick, turning him into a typical urban Bengali man full of suspiciously tall claims, but the performance is too much a caricature! Of the three, Anirban as Shankar is the only actor who almost gets the Pinter pitch right, including his delivery of the older brother’s crucial monologue at the end of Act 2. The deepening of the light on Shankar during the long speech is, as suggested by Pinter’s script, and Anirban’s obvious appeal for the audience to feel for him—his face is tearful at the end of the speech—render the scene too overtly sentimental. Pinter’s stage directions do not specify if Aston should break into tears during his speech, but the overflow of emotions is not Pinter’s signature style. The production crosses the fine line between empathy and sympathy. A Pintersesque treatment would arguably have aimed to solicit empathy for the medical torture that Aston had to undergo, but Anirban’s performance tilts the production toward raw pity for the character. The stage (Pradip Patra and Madan Mistri), lighting (Dhanapati Mondal) and sound design (Anindya Nandi and Biplab Dutta) are effective, but the production design might have been more effective if more darkness than light had been used. As the analytical summary in the production brochure shows, Mukherjee and Goswami’s interpretation of the play, as directors, remains absurdist and the production remains faithful to this existentialist reading. Having said that, the performance does not do justice to the expressive form demanded by this kind of theater.To sum up, Anya Theater’s Caretaker presents Harold Pinter’s tragi-comedy well but misses the work’s use of understatement. The Bengali production offers a moving spectacle of power equations that shift uncertainly between the domestic interior and its promised rejuvenation. One hopes Caretaker paves the way for more Pinter productions in Bengali theater and that directors seriously engage not only with Pinter’s philosophical vision but also with his theatrical language.