Three characters go through their motions in a dilapidated West London house. Aston (Richard Donelly) has just rescued Davies (Nigel Gore) from a beating at a café where the latter was working. They are in the single room, cluttered with junk, where Aston lives while he is supposed to be fixing up the building for his younger brother Mick (Mark Peckham), who owns the place and has plans to sell it.

Gentrification does not come easily to mind with these men in this place. Set designer Elijah Driscoll and scenic artist Eleanor Boober have made physical a cluttered mind. Pinter does specify some things, such as a lawn mower and an Electrolux, but they choose to have an incongruous Grecian-design tall plaster candle holder jutting out of the requisite shopping cart. Equally in contrast to the squalor is an ornately decorated, and chipped, toilet bowl. Aston says that he doesn't know why he was attracted to buy the Buddha that sits above the disconnected gas stove.

The floor of this flat could buckle under the weight of all the symbolism it contains. The dust-coated peace of its torpor could be shattered as easily as the plaster Buddha. We'd vaguely feel something was amiss without the stack of old newspapers that have recorded the dismal past of this world. The bucket suspended from the ceiling under a leaky roof collects drips that now and then resound like Big Ben. These three dead-end lives are not decorously measured out in coffee spoons.

Gore is an animated dust ball of darting gestures and obsequious patter, at first, as the rescued derelict. Costume designer Marilyn Salvatore makes the filthy Davies a tattered walking rag bag and Gore does the rest, by turns puffing him up and deflating him as circumstances ebb and flow. At first the old man is overcome with appreciation in realizing that he has not just been invited in for momentary shelter but can stay and sleep in a bed rather than an alley. Of course, after a couple of weeks, when he's accustomed to this and is annoyed by Aston wanting the window open, things change. (In a delightful characterization detail, Pinter has him brag about leaving a marriage after a week because he lifted the lid of a saucepan on the stove only to find his wife's unmentionables soaking.) When Davies figures he can play the brothers off each other and become caretaker of the place, victim becomes victimizer as easily as a sore hardens to a scab.

Donelly is a wonder as Aston, his character more fascinating the more we watch. Pinter's signature pauses come into play here as pacing, under the careful direction of Bill Cain, one of the earliest actors at Trinity Rep. Donelly doesn't take obvious measures, such as a shuffling gait; no overly slow actions signal a slow mind. He just has Aston be very deliberate in all he does or says, not making him feeble-minded as much as very, very careful in this dangerous world. By the time Aston gets his long soliloquy, which ends Act Two, and we hear of the trapped-animal struggle he had as a boy in a mental hospital, desperate that they not work on his brain to calm him down, we're putty in Donelly's meticulous, masterful hands.

As the younger brother who gets to lord it over the other two, Peckham gives effective menace and snarl in his teasing Davies for amusement. Mick's exchanges are mostly with the new arrival rather than with his brother. I missed the slyness in the meanness, though, which would have helped me follow what is going on in Mick's head as he toys with the old man like a street hooligan dangling a scrap of meat above a leaping mutt.

First Stage Providence is an ad hoc company, produced by local theater stalwart Cait Calvo, with now-and-then productions in venues of opportunity. They last did a fine rendition of Chekhov's Three Sisters more than a year ago, and the folklife Quilters a year before that. Check out this first-rate production. Bring some friends so they get a boffo box office. I'd like to see more from these people, and sooner.

Issue Date: February 14 - 20, 2003