Harold Pinter is famous for deliberately enigmatic works, and that includes his 1960 breakthrough play, “The Caretaker,” now at Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Tony winner Jonathan Pryce.
Before a word is even spoken or, since Pinter is a master of eloquent silence, a pregnant pause is made and a question hits you: Will the set slide forward? It’s positioned so far away from the seats in the Harvey Theater it’s as though director Christopher Morahan wanted to keep us at arm’s length.
As it happens, the scenery doesn’t budge, but three performances click effectively into place in Morahan’s staging, seen in 2009 in the U.K. His take emphasizes jagged humor without erasing the ominous feeling enveloping this tragicomedy about three people and shifting power — a popular Pinter motif.
The three participants are the mangy and bigoted homeless tramp Davies (Pryce) and two brothers — meek Aston (Alan Cox) and ominous Mick (Alex Hassell). For reasons unknown, the sibs each ask the bedraggled bum to be the caretaker of their crumbling West London building.
The action that unfolds in a cluttered attic room where a green Buddha gazes out at towers of old newspapers, a nonworking stove and miscellaneous bric-a-brac. Aston could be a guest star on “Hoarders.”
Pryce, who’s won Tonys for “Comedians” and “Miss Saigon,” brings Davies to life with telling tics. At times his Welsh accent obscures lines, but he also can make a single-syllable “air” sound with symphonic resonance. Hassell and Cox both lend excellent support as the lines between good bro and bad bro blur.
Menace was Pinter’s middle name. And if this production downplays the dread, it appears in clever ways. An amplified drop of rain from a leaky roof into a bucket pings, faintly recalling a shot from a gun with a silencer. A box of matches is shaken and sounds like a rattlesnake ready to strike. As in life and in Pinter, danger is there, teasing at the edges.
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