The third most famous tramp in modern drama — let’s give top places to the duo in Waiting For Godot — was last seen in the West End a decade ago and a very nasty piece of work he was.
As played by Michael Gambon, Pinter’s Davies was a great gorilla with a head that looked like a red cabbage that had been marinated in the mud that stretched from his matted hair to long johns that probably hadn’t been washed since the 19th century. You could smell him in the stalls — and the stench was of malice, menace and danger.
It was a formidable performance, but beside the Davies that Jonathan Pryce is bringing from Liverpool to London a limited one. The actor who made his name exuding menace and danger finds far more than that in the role. As performers from Donald Pleasence through Warren Mitchell to the Great Gambon have shown, Davies is a character who can be played in many different ways. He can be peppy, forlorn, bullying, querulous, sly, feral, beaten, pathetic. Well, Pryce managed to be all those things — and, interestingly, also a tramp whose pretensions to respectability incongruously extended to folding his awful trousers and carefully placing them over a chair.
Christopher Morahan’s production, always strong, turns one of even Pinter’s most enigmatic and suggestive plays into the tale of three dreamers who are also seriously damaged men. One, Peter McDonald’s big, benign, desolate Aston, is an ex-mental patient whose hope is simply to build a shed in the garden below the grotty attic where he subsists. His brother and the attic’s owner, Sam Spruell’s outwardly tough but inwardly desperate Mick, improbably plans to turn it into a mod-con paradise. But Davies is, among other things, the archetypal Pinter intruder with archetypal Pinter ambitions. He wants to commandeer the place for himself.
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He’s cunning, which is why he nearly succeeds, but also stupid, which is why he fails. So what Pryce gives us is a man who is wary to the point of paranoia — his Davies is a Welshman with multiple names and accents to call on — but so self-involved he can’t see which brother is his friend and which isn’t.
He’s also mean yet oddly jovial, ferociously aggressive yet, at the end, pitiable in his loneliness. Is there a more complete performance on offer in London? Can’t think of one.
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