NEW YORK STAGE Brotherhood Rivalry Caught In Crossfire: Three Actors Shine In Pinter's Classic `The Caretaker' By MALCOLM JOHNSON Courant Theater Critic November 10 2003 NEW YORK -- The young man in the black leather jacket sits hunched on the edge of the brass bed, silent amid the gray light in the junk-crowded room, with its random detritus: old crystal chandeliers, stacks of ladders against a wall, a gilded plaster Buddha atop a useless old gas stove. For a long time, he remains mute, staring into nowhere. Then, hearing sounds on the stair, he rises and quietly slips away through a darkened corridor. This is how David Jones' funny, unsettling, perfectly calibrated revival of Harold Pinter's early "The Caretaker" begins in the gloomy garret/warehouse designed by John Lee Beatty. As acted by Patrick Stewart, Kyle MacLachlan and the young English actor Aidan Gillen, all three superb, the production that opened Sunday at the Roundabout Theatre Company's American Airlines Theatre sweeps away some of the more outr interpretations of this early, still vital Pinter play. In the hands of Jones and his actors, "The Caretaker" never feels stylized or mysterious or obscurely symbolic. There are absurdist touches, to be sure, in the repeated dialogue, in the nasty trick of scaring a sleeping old tramp by running a vacuum cleaner in the blackness of night. Mostly though, Jones's muscularly staged production sets out deeply human, and essentially realistic portraits of two brothers, each mad in his own way, and their "caretaker," an old, raving, vicious bigot with at least two names. Over the three acts of the play, Pinter explores the rivalry and brotherhood of Gillen's leather-jacketed Mick, who sees himself as a budding entrepreneur with a taste for Tchaikovsky, and MacLachlan's lost, sweet, kindly Aston, bent on building a small shed in the yard below his grimy window. Stewart's cadging, fawning, abusive Mac Davies, brought to the dusty, peeling flat by the pitying Aston, moves in, and tries to make a place for himself by driving the brothers apart. The play, published and produced in 1960 and filmed in 1964 (its American title was "The Guest"), uses its triangle of three characters to underline a group dynamic, which decrees that one of the three shall be an outsider. The phenomenon achieves its physical manifestation in a scene, both droll and menacing, in which a leather bag brought to Davies by Aston is grabbed by Mick, and then changes hands repeatedly. Here, the mild-mannered Aston, the older sibling, appears to be dominant over the rough-edged and sometimes sadistic Mick, while the helpless Davies is caught between kindness and nastiness. Yet as played by a raffish, almost unrecognizable Stewart in one of his more masterly characterizations on the American stage, Davies is the divisive force, whose moods shift from ingratiating to hostile. There is the matter of his shoes. Costumed by Jane Greenwood in stained union suit, tattered suspendered trousers and a dirty vest, Davies (also known as Jenkins) comes home with Aston after being fired from a menial job at a caf, with sandals on his feet. After making himself at home, he more or less demands shoes. Aston fishes a pair from under the bed, but they do not suit the guest. Later, when Aston brings home a better fit, Davies grouses about having to wear black shoes with brown shoelaces. By this time, he has grown quite grand, sporting a wine-hued smoking jacket, also provided by the helpful Aston. Davies represents the disinherited of England in the postwar years, raging against "Greeks," "Poles," "blacks." He is a darkly etched portrait of what Shaw's Doolittle called "the undeserving poor," now on the fringes of the welfare state. Mick is a '60s version of "the new man," another Shavian idea, with his leather jacket and van, and surprising interior design sense. Aston, dressed by Greenwood in a conservative suit and an overcoat missing a middle button, stands for the traditional Englishman, noble and humanistic. Yet now he is half ruined by a shock treatment, for his "hallucinations." "I used to get the feeling I could see things," he says, and he was punished for it. Under the almost nightmarish lighting by Peter Kaczorowski, all three actors relate grippingly. Stewart, his white hair feathering out around his bald crown, uses his biting baritone to rip into Davies' enemies, present and absent, while ruminating on his lost identity and the need to travel to Sidcup to reclaim his real self. The angel-faced Gillen, who first sneaks up on the old man, grabs him, throws him down and places a black-shod foot over his face, uses cruel humor on Davies, comparing him to various men he has known and thoroughly confusing the old boy. But it is MacLachlan who is the revelation. At first quiet and calm and broken, his Aston reaches his peak in recounting capture and his confinement in a mental institution, where he struggled as "pincers" were clamped to his head, emerging as a changed man: "very slow." It is a wrenching passage, summoned from a great depth. Yet Aston can be commanding too, when he stands, muscular in a sleeveless undershirt, over little Davies with a thrusting penknife. The influence of Pinter on "Twin Peaks" has rarely, if ever, been mooted. But the presence of David Lynch's icon in "The Caretaker" makes you wonder about the similarities, in black humor, and in the very strangeness of life.