Although it was the sixth of his major works for stage and television, this psychological study of the confluence of power, allegiance, innocence, and corruption among two brothers and a tramp, became Pinter's first significant commercial success.

[2] In 1963, a film version of the play based on Pinter's unpublished screenplay was directed by Clive Donner.

The movie starred Alan Bates as Mick and Donald Pleasence as Davies in their original stage roles, while Robert Shaw replaced Peter Woodthorpe as Aston.

A night in winter Aston has invited Davies, a homeless man, into his flat after rescuing him from a bar fight (7–9).

He claims that his papers validating this fact are in Sidcup and that he must and will return there to retrieve them just as soon as he has a good pair of shoes.

Davies denies that he made any noise and blames the racket on the neighbours, revealing his fear of foreigners: "I tell you what, maybe it were them Blacks" (23).

The three battle over the "bag" that Aston has brought Davies, one of the most comic and often-cited Beckettian routines in the play (38–39).

Davies, outraged, claims that Mick will take his side and kick Aston out instead and leaves in a fury, concluding (mistakenly): "Now I know who I can trust" (69).

According to Pinter's biographer Michael Billington, the playwright frequently discussed details of The Caretaker's origins in relation to images from his own life.

Billington notes in his authorised biography that Pinter said he had written the play while he and his first wife Vivien Merchant were living in Chiswick: [The flat was] a very clean couple of rooms with a bath and kitchen.

he managed rather more successfully than Aston, but he was very introverted, very secretive, had been in a mental home some years before and had had some kind of electrical shock treatment .

I call him a tramp, but he was just a homeless old man who stayed three or four weeks.According to Billington, Pinter described Mick as the most purely invented character of the three.

For the tramp, Davies, however, he felt a certain kinship, writing "[The Pinters' life in Chiswick] was a very threadbare existence .

For earlier critics, like Martin Esslin, The Caretaker suggests aspects of the Theatre of the Absurd, described by Esslin in his eponymous book coining that term first published in 1961; according to Esslin, absurdist drama by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Edward Albee, and others was prominent in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a reaction to chaos witnessed in World War II and the state of the world after the war.

[citation needed] Billington observes that "The idea that [Davies] can affirm his identity and recover his papers by journeying to Sidcup is perhaps the greatest delusion of all, although one with its source in reality"; as "Pinter's old Hackney friend Morris Wernick recalls, 'It is undoubtedly true that Harold, with a writer's ear, picked up words and phrases from each of us.

The Sidcup in The Caretaker comes from the fact that the Royal Artillery HQ was there when I was a National Serviceman and its almost mythical quality as the fount of all permission and record was a source.'

To English ears," Billington continues, "Sidcup has faintly comic overtones of suburban respectability.

For Davies it is a Kentish Eldorado: the place that can solve all the problems about his unresolved identity and uncertain past, present and future" (122).

About directing a production of The Caretaker at the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2003, David Jones observed: The trap with Harold's work, for performers and audiences, is to approach it too earnestly or portentously.

And in their dance to that end they show a frenetic vitality and a wry sense of the ridiculous that balance heartache and laughter.

"[3]Hickling writes in this review of a production directed by Mark Babych in March 2009: [The Caretaker] remains, however, a remorselessly accurate record of its time.

At the center of the drama is the horrifically indiscriminate use of shock therapy, which left one of the characters with brain damage; Matthew Rixon's disturbingly docile Aston is a brilliant portrait of the horrors inflicted by a supposedly civilised state.

Character is no longer the clearly perceived entity underlying clarity of articulation the objectification of a social and moral entelechy but something amorphous and contingent (41).

[3][4] Elements of comedy appear in the monologues of Davies and Mick, and the characters' interactions at times even approach farce.

[3] For instance, the first scene of Act Two, which critics have compared to the hat and shoe sequences in Beckett's Waiting for Godot,[citation needed] is particularly farcical: ASTON offers the bag to DAVIES.

[citation needed] 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.

[citation needed] The play depends more on dialogue than on action; however, though there are fleeting moments in which each of them does seem to reach some understanding with the other, more often, they avoid communicating with one another as a result of their own psychological insecurities and self-concerns.

Davies uses an assumed name and has convinced himself that he is really going to resolve his problems relating to his lack of identity papers, even though he appears too lazy to take any such responsibility for his own actions and blames his inaction on everyone but himself.

Mick believes that his ambitions for a successful career outweigh his responsibility to care for his mentally damaged brother.

The deceit and isolation in the play lead to a world where time, place, identity, and language are ambiguous and fluid.