SOURCE: Review of The Caretaker, in The Hudson Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter, 1961, pp. 590-91.

In the following review, Simon can find nothing of value in The Caretaker.

Not since Joanna Southcote announced that she would give birth to the Messiah, have there been such public pangs and heaving—and such a failure to produce even a ridiculus mus—as the Lyceum (operating) Theatre, where Harold Pinter's The Caretaker tossed and moaned like a parturient Ingmar Bergman heroine. We have heard this play explained by assorted mystagogues as a tragicomic excursion into the Kafkaesque realms of human non-communication; as a salty satire on the British middle class with all its prejudices, pretensions, and absurdity; as a Manichaean parable of man's existence; and as an insoluble conundrum full of fascinating and funny details. One of the producers freely admitted that he does not understand it, which, however, did not keep...