Setting

The Caretaker is set in a single room, a dismal space full of assorted junk and with one window half covered by a sack. Among the objects in the room are paint buckets, a lawn-mower, suitcases, a rolled-up carpet, a pile of old newspapers, and a statue of the Buddha atop a gas stove that does not work. A bucket, used to catch water from the leaking roof, hangs from the ceiling. The room has so much junk in it that it seems more a storage area than a place to live. The room stores not only useless junk but, metaphorically, useless people such as Aston, who can no longer have a real life in the outside world, and briefly Davies, who, in a sense, is just another useless thing that Aston has picked up and brought back to the room.

With its collection of junk, its leaky...