The Caretaker, Greenwich Theatre London

Imbalance of power

Responding to English Touring Theatre's production of The Caretaker, one journalist piously complained that Harold Pinter's play "does not present a positive image of the homeless". Well, I laughed like a drain when this remark was first drawn to my attention. Yes, I thought, and King Lear does absolutely nothing to lessen the stigma attached to illegitimacy.

On reflection, though, I feel that, in its own inept way, the comment is quite suggestive. Pinter can't, after all, be accused of trowelling on the sentiment in his depiction of Davies, the tramp who plays two brothers off against each other in the struggle for territorial rights in a dingy, junk-filled room. The play doesn't shirk the conclusion that those near the bottom of the heap will despise and exploit those even lower (here the mentally ill, blacks, Indians). There is no cant about destitution being good for the soul. Earlier this autumn, the Young Vic revived David Rudkin's 1962 drama Afore Night Come, which features an Irish vagrant whose blustering, baseless grandiosity makes him first cousin to Davies. But whereas you respond with horror to his bloody ritual scapegoating, the likelihood of Davies's eventual eviction comes, principally, as a blessed relief.

In Gari Jones's under-powered and long-winded revival, the balance of power between the three men is distorted by some strange casting. Julian Lewis-Jones gives a haunting, beautifully judged performance as Aston, the kindly, burnt-out husk of a man who has been devastated by mental anguish and electric shock treatment. I could have done without the twee touch of the little Christmas tree with fairy lights that, in this version, he sets up shortly before delivering his long monologue about the virtual torture therapy he received at hospital. This heart-rendingly dignified tour de force needs no twinkly visual aids.

As Davies, Malcolm Storry is often eye-catchingly comic, whether affecting a virginal modesty over the undressing arrangements in the room or a hilarious man-of-the-world lope when he dons the red velvet smoking jacket. He's excellent at projecting the tramp's delusions of grandeur, but he's such a powerfully built and vigorous man that the twitchy, flat- footed shuffling looks phony. This is the first time I have watched the play and hoped that one day I would see the actor playing Davies in the role of Shakespeare's Antony. You feel Storry could easily wipe the floor with Lee Boardman's podgy wideboy of a Mick, who seems to hail from a later period than the other two, like the plastic, Pret-a-Manger-style sandwich box from which he eats his lunch.

Annie Castledine once directed a production which reinvented the tramp as a female character. It made a nonsense of the power games. But Jones's version demonstrates that the effect is almost as peculiar if you present Mick as an underlyingly weak and troubled individual. Boardman is about as unnerving as the poor man's Robbie Williams he resembles, and he never convinces you that there is a long-term strategy in Mick's alarmingly erratic behaviour and tactical, exposing intimacies. The play's title could refer, with varying degrees of irony, to each of the characters. Here, though, its application to Mick, looking after his brother's interests, is blurred. In that respect, this production "does not present a positive image" of the play.

Blackpool Grand Theatre, 4-8 Dec