Jonathan Pryce revisits The Caretaker

Jonathan Pryce as Davies in 'The Caretaker' - photo by Helen Warner  

Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce has some very impressive accolades under his belt; he has won two Tony Awards (Comedians in 1977 and Miss Saigon in 1991), Best Actor at Cannes (Carrington in 1995) and has also been awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to Drama in 2009.

These are just some of the awards Pryce has gotten his hands on over the years, so when he tells us he fell into the business by accident it is difficult to believe him, “All I had ever wanted to do when I was at school was to paint. [At college] you had to do a subsidiary course and I was advised by friends that the easiest course to do, the one that required the least amount of work, was the Drama course; so that was what I set out to do,” he tells us from his home in London.

Pryce only realised he was into acting when he started working with Jerry Dawson at Unity Theatre. “This coupled with the fact more people were saying they liked my acting than they liked my painting, it made me think that [acting] was something I could do. It culminated with the fact that there was a girls’ college down the road and they needed men for their productions, so I ran down the road to put my name forward,” he says.

His tutors were impressed with the promising talent of a boy who had come from a very small village in North Wales and had no history whatsoever in the world of performing arts. They coached Pryce through two auditions and sent off his application forms to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was rapidly offered a scholarship. “I had a very good interest in teachers at RADA, especially a man called Keith Johnstone who used to conduct improvisation sessions. I think that through him my love of performance grew. He was kind of a guru for the improvisation movement, comic improvisation anyways. He was fundamental in starting up Whose Line Is It Anyway?” Pryce explains.

Australia had already been on the actor’s cards a couple of times before, but both film projects that were meant to bring Pryce down under fell through. The Caretaker at Adelaide Festival will mark his official debut in the country. The play is a Harold Pinter classic that often evokes comparisons to Samuel Beckett’s absurdist comedy Waiting for Godot. The masterwork about ‘two brothers and a caretaker’ – as Pinter liked to describe it - is no stranger to Pryce’s own extensive curriculum vitae; he played Mick back in 1981 and had the opportunity to meet Pinter then.

“We recorded [The Caretaker] for the BBC and then were advised to take it to the National Theatre because it was Harold’s 50th birthday celebration there and they wanted to mark it by putting on a production of one of his plays,” says Price. “We had the read-through at the BBC and that was when I first met him. Even then he was a formidable character. I knew he had a very kind of fearsome reputation as being quite guarded about his work and wanting things done his way, but if anything, he was the opposite. He was very friendly and very supportive of what we were doing.”

“I think I remember that one of the early questions to him was about observing the pauses in the script, because that seems to mark out Pinter to a lot of people in their minds about the Pinteresque pauses. He said that we were to be as free as we’d like with them and to use them if we wanted to, if we didn’t, they were generally there to indicate where you could get a laugh. I’ve met other people that worked with him whom he has told the absolute opposite to. It was horses for courses really. He was unpredictable in that way,” Pryce says and laughs.

Pryce and Pinter kept a friendly relationship throughout the years catching up at social events through various restaurants in London. “I have enormous respect and regard for him as a human being, as a political being and as a writer,” Pryce reveals. “[Pinter] would come and see shows that I did. When I was doing Glenngarry Glen Ross in the West End about four or five years ago, he was quite ill then. He was supposed to come and see the production one night and he was so unwell he had to cancel. Then we had the word that Harold was in for this particular night and he was in a box on the left hand side of the theatre. Knowing he was there, instead of favouring the side of the stage that I would normally favour, I spent the evening sort of angling myself around towards the box I thought Harold was sitting [in]. The curtain call came and the lights came up and he was sitting in the opposite box, so I had wasted my time favouring Harold,” he laughs.

Pryce has a reputation for choosing his theatre roles carefully, the actor usually goes for texts in which he can initially create the character, then recreate it and keep finding new elements in. When he has to play a part eight times a week, for months on end, it is seemingly a very fair demand. The Caretaker is one of such works. “The danger with The Caretaker is that people have terrible misconceptions about Pinter and the play itself. They think of Pinter as being difficult, a bit arty, not quite for them,” he says. “But I think once audiences see it, they find it surprisingly funny. It is very dark humour, it’s also very moving and it says a great deal about the human condition. It is an extraordinary piece of writing.”

When director Christopher Morahan asked Pryce if he had ever considered playing the character of Davies after watching the actor’s inspired performance as a “quite outrageous, slightly angry Welshman” in a TV comedy episode they were working on together about four years ago, Pryce, who had always wanted to play Davies, thought this was the perfect opportunity.

However, he had one condition. “If we were going to do it, I wanted to do it at Liverpool’s The Everyman where I had started work in 1972 and worked on and off for three years. It meant a great deal to me, it was where I started, where I learnt my craft and that building has now been torn down so it was my last chance to go back there and work, so that’s what we did,” he says.

Pryce says he owes his highly acclaimed performance to Pinter’s text, “It’s a very rich and dense text. All the clues are there and you can bring your own feelings about why that man is on the street, what has happened to him, why he is so sympathetic to the mentally unstable Aston. When Aston talks about having electroconvulsive therapy, Davies also gives some hints that he has also spent time in a mental hospital. These people don’t go away and despite all the government policies, instead of being taken care of by society, they’re thrown into society and they have to fend for themselves, people who live on the streets or who need psychiatric help and don’t get it. I think Davies is one of those that fell through the net somewhere.”

The production has travelled from Liverpool to Bath and then London to rave reviews in advance of their Australian season. The Caretaker will also head to the United States after it wraps up in Adelaide. Australia will see two new cast members alongside Pryce as Alan Cox and Alex Hassle fill in for Sam Spruell and Peter McDonald. McDonald is unavailable due to being nominated for an Academy Award for his short film Pentecost this year. “We're all very excited for him but very sad he can't be with us in Australia,” says Pryce.

Pryce is as excited to play the role of tramp Davies again - it has been eighteen months since he last performed it - as he is to finally be coming our way. “The sad thing is that I’m only coming for three weeks and we’ll only be in Adelaide and as interesting as that is going to be I’d like to come back and travel a little more. I’m really looking forward to it and the fact that there is a festival going on at the same time it’s going to make it even more interesting,” he says.

So don’t be surprised if you find Mr. Pryce sitting next to you at the theatre on his night off.