Did critics care for The Caretaker?

Holly Williams, WhatsOnStage

★★★★

"This is an exceptionally funny rendition of Pinter's blackly comic play."

"Spall has blissful comic timing, turning those famous pauses into build-ups to punch-lines. Eyes as wild as his hair, he gives Davies a plethora of physical ticks and shuffling gestures, all wrapped in stained undergarments and a dishevelled suit: think Frank Gallagher of Shameless meets Bill Bailey in Black Books."

"MacKay rips through his speeches at applause-winning pace and a weirdly well-enunciated Cockney yowl, but although this finds the funnies, it loses some of the ominous weight of the words."

Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph

★★★

"How does Spall fare? Well enough, I’d say, but while he looks the part with wild grey hair, heavy black overcoat and old pinstripe trousers, he’s hobbled rather than helped by aspects of his interpretation."

"George MacKay as a smooth, poised, leather-jacketed Mick elicits knee-jerk laughs – even applause – for taking his big deadpan addresses at a barely comprehensible lick, but we lose the inventive, wrong-footing particulars amid the deliberate haste."

"Daniel Mays… achieves in Aston’s slow-moving actions and speech, culminating in his sad, dazed recollection of his brutal psychiatric treatment, the most affecting moments of the night."

Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail

★★★

"[The part] allows him [Timothy Spall] to give full vent to the grumpy, inscrutable and tender talents that make him one of our finest actors."

"The play may have launched Pinter on a 50-year journey to the Nobel prize and some say it changed the course of British drama. But there’s no question that it’s dated. Spall’s character ranting like Steptoe or Alf Garnet about 'blacks' won’t win many new fans today. It was a different universe of deference and end of empire."

"Colourful turns and virtuosic displays as all three give, it’s not a play that’s easy to love. It represents a dank, dark Britain which could be in another galaxy and makes you hope stays that way."

Ann Treneman, The Times

★★★★

"It’s an exotic creature that we see before us, this old tramp going by the name of Davies, created by Timothy Spall. Pinter may have written the part but this Davies, so fastidious and at the same time so unkempt, feels like Spall's work."

"Matthew Warchus directs here and has done a good job of balancing out these three men. It would have been easy to let Spall take over with his mumbling tramp act, a shambling wreck with oh-so-pernickety ways."

"Still, at three hours with two intervals, The Caretaker is a slow burn. It's helpful that Rob Howell has designed a set that is rewarding to look at, a hoarder’s cornucopia, and it was a particularly English touch that, outside the filthy attic window, it’s usually raining. Indeed, it seems to rain almost all the time in Pinterland. But we knew that."

Michael Billington, The Guardian

★★★★

"The temptation is to play Aston, the victim of electro-convulsive therapy, as a gentle giant in the manner of Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. But the supreme virtue of Daniel Mays’s performance is that he reminds us that Aston, for all his grace and obsession with three-pin plugs, is full of residual anger."

"There is an equally revelatory performance from George MacKay as Mick."

"In short, Warchus’s production, performed inside a wonderfully dilapidated set by Rob Howell, treats the play less as a microcosmic study of power-politics and more as a strange comedy about a trio of deluded outsiders. It may not be the whole truth about Pinter but, in dispensing with awed reverence, it gives the play a renewed vigour and zest."

Natasha Tripney, The Stage

★★★

"Timothy Spall plays Davies, a shambling homeless man who is given a bed for the night by the slow moving Aston. Once there he infiltrates Aston's decaying and cluttered attic room like a weed. He's the classic pushy Pinter outsider, disruptive, insistent, menacing yet pathetic. It's a large role and Spall's performance is also one of considerable size."

"Daniel Mays is a lurching gentle presence as Aston, precise, hulking yet delicate. He's the most taciturn of all the characters but he puts that eloquent Bash Street kid face of his to great use, and manages to express much even when being still."

"Like Warchus’ previous Old Vic production, Ibsen's The Master Builder, this is something of a beast: three hours long with two intervals, but while it never exactly drags, it also never quite earns its length either and there are times when it feels a bit bloated."

The Caretaker runs at the Old Vic unitl 14 May.