The forte of Firth (week of 16 June 1991, some London newspaper)

"I adored the play and wanted to work with Pinter and Pleasence," says Colin Firth. "But I wasn't sure I wanted to play another character with problems. I thought I might find it depressing."

After playing a brain-damaged Falklands soldier in Tumbledown and a shell-shocked soldier in A Month in the Country, the role of Aston, the retarded brother in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, did not immediately appeal. "I felt I wanted to play D'Artagnan instead. I thought I'd like to lighten up a bit at some point."

But during rehearsals, a curious thing happened. "I've fallen totally in love with the character. He's really one of the most happy and hopeful characters I've played. He's supremely generous. There's a real purity about him."

Which is more than can be said of the part of Valmont, the lead character in the film of the same name adapted from Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Milos Forman. The film, which suffered comparison to the American version of the story Dangerous Liaisons, will be released in London in November.

"It's quite epic - a masterpiece," says Firth, who describes his character as a manipulator. In Out of the Blue, a new film for the BBC which will be screened this autumn, he plays another character, a would-be film-maker, who attempts to control his life by scripting "spontaneous" events around him. Firth adds that "if you're unlucky" we might also catch him in Femme Fatale, an independent American film whose merits are, he fears, more uncertain.

Sidcup or bust? (Annalena McAfee, reviewing for some London paper, week of 16 June 1991)

...All three characters in the play have dreams which they will never fulfil. Aston, a slow-witted misfit who offers the tramps a bed in his squalid attic room, plans to build a garden shed but has got no further than acquiring a few planks.

Aston's brother Mick, a malicious wide-boy, plans to "decorate up" the derelict building.

The brothers offer Davies the job of caretaker but he has set his sights on Sidcup, just as soon as the weather breaks and he gets a decent pair of shoes.

Colin Firth's touching Aston has an unexpected dignity. He summons pathos as much from his considered reflection on Guinness (heartbreakingly, Davies responds with a comment on the weather) as with his account of his terrible experiences in a psychiatric hospital...

Pinter with heart (Charles Spencer, reviewing for the Times, week of 16 June 1991)

...But perhaps the most surprising feature of this exemplary production is its humanity. As the older brother Aston, Colin Firth's hypnotic account of the terrifying treatment he received in a mental hospital sends the shivers coursing down the spine, and throughout with his ugly voice and awkward posture, he movingly captures the character's wounded inadequacy, diffident charity and aching need for friendship. ...

Taking care of death in Sidcup (Benedict Nightingale reviewing for the Times, week of 16 June 1991)

...Pinter's production emphasises the vulnerability of youth as well as age, casting unusually young actors as the brothers. Peter Howitt's Mick might be a leather-clad tough leaving the pub for a game at Highbury; but there is burning disappointment in him, too, as well as covert affection for Colin Firth's Aston, whose blank face and flat, dull voice mask a desperate attempt to clamber out of chaos. The smile they exchange while Davies flounders justifies John Arden's remark, that one of the play's subjects is "the strength of family ties against an intruder". What can we call so subtle, suggestive and fascinating a piece but a classic?

Pinter's potent poetic power (Jack Tinker reviewing for the Daily Mail, week of 16 June 1991)

...Mr. Pleasence is recreating the role he first played in the West End back in 1960. His hypnotic energy, his burst of sinister physical violence, his ingratiating slyness and his ultimately impotent powerplay to carve a niche even in this leaky attic dump, have gained rather than diminished in their intensity.

Impressive too, are the contrasting performances of Colin Firth, compellingly still and passively impregnable as the tramp's gentle host, and Peter Howitt, volatile and armed with a maverick, menacing charm as his wheeler-dealer brother. The play is directed by Pinter himself.

The Merchant of Menace as victim (Maureen Paton, week of 16 June 1991)

...For this is a play about territorial jealousies and Davies has invaded Mick's space. Alan Bates originally created this brutal flashy role and Howitt is an impressively sadistic successor.

As his lobotomised brother Aston, Colin Firth has the brooding look of a man whose brain has been truly disconnected.

Pinter himself directs his menacing comedy of non-communication.

The Caretaker (Michael Billington reviews the play, week of 16 June 1991)

...The play grips us because the symbolism arises directly from the action. But, seeing it again at the Comedy, one is also reminded that Pinter is a Cockney humourist and master of what Peter Hall calls the "piss take." Mick, the abrasive landlord, is the first in a long live of spivvy Pinter bullies who seek to establish spiritual dominance through the send-up; indeed the highlight of the play for me is the speech where Aston takes on the itinerant Davies by browbeating him with an A to Z tour of the London boroughs. As so often in Pinter, the piss take becomes an instrument of power.

Mr. Pleasence has the difficult task of competing with memories of himself. The two brothers, however, have no such problems. Peter Howitt's Mick is a lovely study of a flashy, leather-jacketed bruiser who you feel, like Lenny in the Homecoming, conceals his inner weakness under a welter of fast talk. And Colin Firth's Aston, suffering from electric shock treatment, is a touching portrait of a gentle, slow-moving giant reminiscent of a different Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

Same bruises thirty years on (John Gross on The Caretaker, week of 16 June 1991)

...There are excellent performances, too, from Peter Howitt and Colin Firth as the brothers. Howitt hints at the buried feelings of tough, leather-jacketed Mick; Firth is wholly convincing as Aston, especially in the long, calm, chilling account of his experiences at the hands of the doctors.
In good order (Paul Taylor on Pinter's The Caretaker, London, week of 16 June 1991) .

As Mick and Aston, Peter Howitt and Colin Firth are both excellent. A leather jacketed tough, Howitt's Mick brings a brilliant, piss-taking menace to the verbal bombardments that leave Davies reeling. Showing how Mick uses language as a cosh, he also gives you glimpses of the insecurity and frustration the cocky manner masks. Like some gentle, diffident giant, Firth, with his awkward postures and nerd- like voice, contributes a remarkable study of a loneliness that seems to have put the sufferer beyond the reach of help or intimidation.

The physical similarity of these two actors underlines a point made by John Arden, that the play "is a study of the unexpected strength of family ties against an intruder". The production brings home bleakly how the play moves from a broad gesture of brotherly love to a narrowly familial one.