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In the end, Donald Pleasence is this play's best excuse for being. Smirking, storming, giggling, cringing, screaming, he is wild, weird and wonderful. Pleasence knows how to invade a playgoer's mind like a neurotic blood relative whom one cannot abide and yet cannot disown. He has the hallucinatory reality of a dream from which one cannot awaken. He provides one of those rare performances that theatergoers will never stop talking about.
"This has been a particularly difficult part for me," said Donald Pleasence one afternoon last week, ranging around his hotel room—all eyes and nose and ovoid skull—turning down the air conditioner, radiating nervous energy. "For one thing, I'm not Jewish, I'm not German, I'm not rich. I had the script for a year. I read Hannah Arendt's book on Eichmann, his testimony at the trial, histories of the war —anything relevant. But Goldman isn't a symbol of Eichmann, Christ, or anyone else. I agree with Pinter. This is a play,' he said at the first reading, 'about a Jew who pretends to be a Nazi and finally turns out to be a Jew. Right? Now let's get on with it.' "
"It was always understood that I'd play the lead and that Harold Pinter would direct." Pleasence partially modeled his performance on a well-known, dictatorial movie producer, whom he prefers not to name. "I used him as a model for a quality I don't have—authority. I can't even get a waiter in a restaurant." Pleasence considers Goldman one of his three best performances—the other two being Davies in Pinter's The Caretaker ("I had the image of an alley cat in mind") and the title role in the Broadway production of Jean Anouilh's Poor Bitos.
The Caretaker was the making of him. Born 49 years ago as the son and grandson of railroad workers in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, Pleasence developed his first yen for acting after his mother had enrolled him in speaking classes. He was an R.A.F. wireless operator in World War II, was shot down, and spent a year in a German prison camp. After some postwar repertory and lots of television, he was about to sign a film contract when he read the script of The Caretaker. The play paid him £10 a week at London's Arts Theater Club; it proved such a hit that it moved to a larger commercial house and ran for more than a year.
Pleasence admits to being typecast as a sinister psychopath in what he calls "glossy movies," such as You Only Live Twice and The Night of the Generals. He doesn't mind, partly because "evil people seem more interesting," partly because of the money he can make. This means a house on the Thames, with a boat at the bottom of the garden and plenty of elbowroom for his wife and two young daughters.