The plays of deadly serious dramatists such as Beckett or Pinter almost always turn out to be funnier than their reputations. But with a lean-and-hungry-looking Timothy Spall in the role of Davies, Matthew Warchus's revival of Pinter's 1960 classic is hilarious. This is not necessarily a good thing.
Davies is the tramp who is given shelter by the loner Aston in the dingiest and leakiest of London garrets. Plaster is falling away from the walls, a suspended bucket catches drips with each plop serving as a magnificent exclamation mark in Pinter's dialogue, and Davies, for whom this place is a palace, cannot quite believe his good luck.
Spall grabs the role with a determination to make his audience laugh. And he succeeds. This is a man who attempts to disguise his wretched condition by adopting the airs and graces of the well-to-do. It can be like watching a drowning man adjust his bow tie - a characteristic Spall takes to the extreme. His hair is a matted, grey cumulonimbus and something about the posture and manner with which Spall fakes his former status makes you think of a restoration dandy who has fallen on hard times.
A velvet smoking-jacket is modelled with pompous discernment, as are a pair of new (old) shoes. We are laughing not at his poverty, of course, but at his belief that he can disguise it with some decent diction and those essential papers held in Sidcup and which are waiting to be collected by him, if only it would stop raining – and they existed.
In Warchus's slow burn of a production, Spall finds every laugh in and between Pinter's lines. And then invents a few more himself. It's all done with superb comic finesse and timing. But there is a cost to being so unambiguously funny. In Caretakers of the past, Davies has been so tragic that laughter triggers guilt that there could ever be anything to enjoy about someone so wretched. With Michael Gambon's, for instance, I remember instinctively stifling my laughter which felt as irresistible as it did inappropriate. Here, there is no such complicating factor. And so the stakes just feel lower.
Still, Spall is not only a clown here. He transmits the internal panic of a man who knows his destitution will kill him if he doesn't hang on to this shelter. The already shadowy production darkens considerably with Aston's detailed memory of being forced to receive electroconvulsive therapy.
A sense of threat emerges with the appearance of Aston's leather-jacketed brother Mick, played with menace and vulnerability by George MacKay. All three are damaged, especially May's Aston who, with his monkish cropped hair exists in a state of post-traumatic stress. He's a shuffling, compulsive-obsessive tragedy, without whom this hugely entertaining evening would have been much too funny.