The Caretaker
Despite those more-recent caveats regarding applying the phrase that he himself initially coined for Pinter's writing to "The Caretaker"—only the second of Pinter's full-length plays produced by then and the one that launched his career as a successful playwright in 1960 (Merritt 9, 226) —and to Pinter's later plays, scenes in both acts of "The Caretaker" in which Mick confronts an unsuspecting Davies and scares him almost speechless (Pinter, "The Caretaker" 129, 146) also epitomise how comedy and menace still co-exist in Pinter's text and on Pinter's stage.