Aston is the person most obviously in need of care in this play – although, I do understand that everyone is in clear need of care here. This is a play of the lost and trapped. All the same, Aston is the only character to really offer any care to anyone else – and everyone else, even his own mother, lets him down in ways that are beyond belief, even when it would seem just as easy to provided him with care as to deny it him. Plays, including The Birthday Party (1958) and The Dumb Waiter (1960), of British playwright, screenwriter, and director Harold Pinter create an atmosphere of menace; people awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. Richardson, Brian. Performance review of The Caretaker, Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.), 12 September 1993. The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1994. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1994. 109–10. Print. Yeah, it's very very very deep. Who am I to say it but whatever the author showed or conveyed in his work could've been done in a less literal way. He made the entire story absurd to prove his point. He made all his characters retards to show the 'stutter' of his time.

For instance, how we believe that if we just did that one thing right before us then everything would work out. It would all work out if we could just do it in exactly the right way and on exactly the right day. Except, well, the problem is that there is no right day. Deep down we know that there is no chance we will ever do that one thing. No matter how simple that thing seems, no matter how we ‘believe’ doing it would fix everything. We will never actually do it. And why? Well, because having that one simple thing always looming as a possibility before us is the only thing that offers us any hope at all. The civic-minded fellow’s brother owns the place and hassles the old homeless man not realising he was invited. In his 1960 book review of The Caretaker, fellow English playwright John Arden writes: "Taken purely at its face value this play is a study of the unexpected strength of family ties against an intruder." [6] As Arden states, family relationships are one of the main thematic concerns of the play.Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 1961. 3rd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. ISBN 1-4000-7523-8 (10). ISBN 978-1-4000-7523-2 (13). Print. What's On: The Caretaker (archived past seasons). Sheffield Theatres, n.d. Web. 13 March 2009. (Run at Sheffield Theatres ended on 11 November 2006.)

Aston smiles at him when he thinks he is asleep. He doesn't know that Davies is watching him through the blanket, only pretending to be asleep. I thought this was great, that smile. That kind of made it for me. That Davies is in this guy's room, pretending to sleep in the bed he gave him. Yet he didn't give it him. He's only borrowing it for an undetermined time. He doesn't know Aston, or what he wants from him. I felt the loneliness and the absurdity. Absurdity and absurdity. Lots of it. Too much of it that it got too, well, absurd. I get it. I get what the writer tried to convey to the audience but for me, it was a reading disaster. I wouldn't have read it at all if I wasn't worried about failing my Drama exam. And this is what we get to study? From the very first, Davies appears quite fixated on race. He refers often to other racial groups, all in denigrating ways. He is suspicious of their position in society, clearly nervous that they are supplanting him or giving themselves airs that they are better than him. His racial prejudice is tied up with his perception that he is a victim, always unfairly shunted aside. It is also part of his defense mechanism, for if he can blame others for his lowly status, then he never has to question himself as to why he cannot hold a job or why he is so unpleasant. Pinter's decision to make Davies a veritable racist is not just in terms of character, but also a manifestation of historical and social realities of the time in which the play was written. Lower-class whites in 1950s Britain were fearful of foreigners usurping their already precarious position in society, and Pinter captures that fear in Davies.

You've got...this thing. That's your complaint. And we've decided, he said, that in your interests there's only one course we can take. He said...he said, we're going to do something to your brain. Aston, 42 That is not evident from Matthew Warchus’s new production. It has a terrific cast. It has sparky moments. But it is not nuanced and never driven. Despite obtrusive music between scenes – doomy chords and what sounds like an amplified mobile phone – there is scarcely a hint of terror. Scarcely a sense that these laughs are a sign of teetering on the edge. One of the keys to understanding Pinter's language is not to rely on the words a character says but to look for the meaning behind the text. The Caretaker is filled with long rants and non-sequiturs, the language is either choppy dialogue full of interruptions or long speeches that are a vocalised train of thought. Although the text is presented in a casual way, there is always a message behind its simplicity. Pinter is often concerned with "communication itself, or rather the deliberate evasion of communication" (Knowles 43). Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts among ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past. Stylistically, these works are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony and menace. Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and vicissitudes of memory. In 1981, Pinter stated that he was not inclined to write plays explicitly about political subjects; yet in the mid-1980s he began writing overtly political plays, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life. This "new direction" in his work and his left-wing political activism stimulated additional critical debate about Pinter's politics. Pinter, his work, and his politics have been the subject of voluminous critical commentary. For a review of the Sheffield Theatres production, see Lyn Gardner, "Theatre: The Caretaker: Crucible, Sheffield", Guardian, Culture: Theatre. Guardian Media Group, 20 October 2006. Web. 12 March 2009.