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| The Dumb Waiter | |
|---|---|
 Actors in The Dumb Waiter as presented by Stairwell Theater in 2019 | |
| Written by | Harold Pinter |
| Characters | Ben Gus |
| Date premiered | 21 January 1960 |
| Place premiered | Hampstead Theatre Club,  United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Comedy drama |
| Setting | A basement room |
| Official site | |
The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by Harold Pinter written in 1957.
Two hit-men, Ben and Gus, are waiting in a basement room for their assignment. As the play begins, Ben, the senior member of the team, is reading a newspaper, and Gus, the junior member, is tying his shoes. Gus asks Ben many questions as he gets ready for their job and tries to make tea. They argue over the semantics of "light the kettle" and "put on the kettle". Ben continues reading his paper for most of the time, occasionally reading excerpts of it to Gus. Ben gets increasingly animated, and Gus's questions become more pointed, at times nearly nonsensical.
In the back of the room is a dumbwaiter, which delivers occasional food orders. This is mysterious and both characters seem to be puzzled why these orders keep coming; the basement is clearly not outfitted as a restaurant kitchen. At one point they send up some snack food that Gus had brought along. Ben has to explain to the people above via the dumbwaiter's "speaking tube" that there is no food.
Gus leaves the room to get a drink of water in the bathroom, and the dumbwaiter's speaking tube whistles (a sign that there is a person on the other end who wishes to communicate). Ben listens carefully—we gather from his replies that their victim has arrived and is on his way to the room. Ben shouts for Gus, who is still out of the room. The door that the target is supposed to enter from flies open, Ben rounds on it with his gun, and Gus enters, stripped of his jacket, waistcoat, tie and gun. There is a long silence as the two stare at each other before the curtain falls.
The dumb waiter of the title refers to the serving hatch and food lift that delivers orders to the gunmen. It could also refer to Gus, who fails to realise that he is waiting to be the victim, or even to Ben, whose obedience to a higher authority eventually forces him to eliminate his partner. [1]
The windowless basement is characteristic of Pinter's sets. "Pinter's rooms are stuffy, non-specific cubes, whose atmosphere grows steadily more stale and more tense. At the opening curtain these rooms look naturalistic, meaning no more than the eye can contain. But, by the end of each play, they become sealed containers, virtual coffins." [2]
Pinter's writing in The Dumb Waiter combines "the staccato rhythms of music-hall cross-talk and the urban thriller". [1] The dialogue between Ben and Gus, while seemingly concerned only with trivial newspaper stories, football matches and cups of tea, reveals their characters. In Pinter's early plays, "it is language that betrays the villains – more pat, more cliché-ridden, with more brute power than that of their victims". [2]
In the theatre, the emotional power of the play is more readily felt than understood. Pinter "created his own theatrical grammar – he didn't merely write characters that had an emotional response to something... But instead, through his characters' interactions and phrasings, Pinter seemed to conjure the very visceral emotion itself". [3]
Although the play is realistic in many ways, particularly the dialogue between Ben and Gus, there are also elements that are unexplained and seemingly absurd, particularly the messages delivered by the dumb waiter itself, and the delivery of an envelope containing twelve matchsticks. Pinter leaves the play open to interpretation, "wanting his audience to complete his plays, to resolve in their own ways these irresolvable matters". [4] Pinter stated that "between my lack of biographical data about [the characters] and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore". [4]
One interpretation is that the play is an absurdist comedy about two men waiting in a universe without meaning or purpose, like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot . "The Dumb Waiter.... achieves, through its unique blend of absurdity, farce, and surface realism, a profoundly moving statement about the modern human condition". [5]
Another interpretation is that the play is a political drama showing how the individual is destroyed by a higher power. "Each of Harold Pinter's [first] four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual.... It is by his bitter dramas of dehumanisation that he implies "the importance of humanity". The religion and society, which have traditionally structured human morality, are, in Pinter's plays, the immoral agents that destroy the individual." [2] Pinter supported the interpretation of The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter as "political plays about power and victimisation". [1]
Overall, "it makes much more sense if seen as a play about the dynamics of power and the nature of partnership. Ben and Gus are both victims of some unseen authority and a surrogate married couple quarrelling, testing, talking past each other and raking over old times". [1] It is "a strongly political play about the way a hierarchical society, in pitting the rebel against the conformist, places both at its mercy", but at the same time "a deeply personal play about the destructiveness of betrayal". [1]
"For an audience to gaze into Ben and Gus' closed basement room and overhear their everyday prattle is to gain insight into ... the terrifying vision of the dominant-subservient battle for power, a battle in which societies and individuals engage as a part of daily existence". [5]
Although the play uses "the semantic nit-picking that is a standard part of music hall comedy" [1] and is generally considered funny, this is not comedy for its own sake, but "a crucial part of the power-structure". [1]
"The comedy routines in the early plays are maps to the themes and meaning of the plays as a whole.... Our failure to laugh may be an indication that we, the audience, have come to side (or have been taught to side) with the victim rather than the victimiser." [6]
The stories Ben picks out from his newspaper have a similar purpose. He describes an old man, wanting to cross the street, who crawls under a lorry and is run over by it (but it is not clear if the man is killed or not). Ben seems to expect the response, "What an idiot!" but Gus replies "Who advised him to do a thing like that?" which shifts responsibility and suggests the old man was a victim to be pitied. "The eventual split between Ben and Gus is foreshadowed in the very first joke.... By the end of the play, Pinter has trained us to see that the content of the joke-exchange is meaningless: what is important is the structure, and the alliances and antagonisms it reveals." [6]
Harry Derbyshire reviewed the play in Modern Drama, concluding "Small but perfectly formed, The Dumb Waiter might be considered the best of Harold Pinter's early plays, more consistent than The Birthday Party and sharper than The Caretaker . It combines the classic characteristics of early Pinter – a paucity of information and an atmosphere of menace, working-class small-talk in a claustrophobic setting – with an oblique but palpable political edge and, in so doing, can be seen as containing the germ of Pinter's entire dramatic oeuvre". [7]
Jamie Glover wrote that "The Dumb Waiter is Pinter distilled – the very essence of a writer who tapped into our desire to seek out meaning, confront injustice and assert our individuality." [3]
The world premiere was in Frankfurt as Der Stumme Diener in February 1959 with Rudolf H. Krieg as Ben and Werner Berndt as Gus. [8]
At Malibu Junior High School sometime in 1979 Emilio Estevez staged this one-act play with young friend and fellow classmate Jeff Lucas. Jeff Lucas played Ben and Emilio Estevez played Gus.
The first performance in London was in January 1960, as part of a double bill with Pinter's first play The Room , at the Hampstead Theatre Club, directed by James Roose-Evans, with Nicholas Selby as Ben and George Tovey as Gus. The production transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in March 1960. [9]
In 1989 a revival at the Theatre Royal Haymarket was directed by Bob Carlton, with Peter Howitt as Ben and Tim Healy as Gus.
In 2007 a revival at the Trafalgar Studios was directed by Harry Burton, with Jason Isaacs as Ben and Lee Evans as Gus.
In 2013 a revival at The Print Room was directed by Jamie Glover, with Clive Wood as Ben and Joe Armstrong as Gus.
In 2019 the play was part of a season of Pinter's one-act plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre, directed by Jamie Lloyd with Danny Dyer as Ben and Martin Freeman as Gus.
In 2020 a 60th anniversary revival at the Hampstead Theatre, directed by Alice Hamilton with Alec Newman as Ben and Shane Zaza as Gus, had an extended run in a COVID secure setting with the audience masked and socially distanced.
In 2004 The Oxford Playhouse presented The Dumb Waiter and Other Pieces by Harold Pinter, directed by Douglas Hodge with Jason Watkins as Ben and Toby Jones as Gus.
In 2012 a young Mark Pallister took on the role of Gus as original cast member the now Famous Lee Evans was unavailable due to his touring schedule.
Mark went on to take further acting roles however it is not known if he is still pursuing an acting career today.
In 2012 The TUTA Theater company presented The Dumb Waiter. [10]
Toronto
In April 2021, the Crane Creations Theatre Company led a play reading of The Dumb Waiter in its monthly play reading event. Hosted by a group of professional theatre artists, the Play Date event aims to spread awareness of playwrights and playwrighting from around the globe.
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
Ada Brand Thomson, known professionally as Vivien Merchant, was an English actress. She began her career in 1942, and became known for dramatic roles on stage and in films. In 1956 she married the playwright Harold Pinter and performed in many of his plays.
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Simon James Holliday Gray was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.
No Man's Land is a play by Harold Pinter written in 1974 and first produced and published in 1975. Its original production was at the Old Vic theatre in London by the National Theatre on 23 April 1975, and it later transferred to Wyndham's Theatre, July 1975 – January 1976, the Lyttelton Theatre April–May 1976, and New York's Longacre Theatre from October–December 1976. It returned to the Lyttelton from January – February 1977. It is a two-act play.
The Birthday Party (1957) is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter, first published in London by Encore Publishing in 1959. It is one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays.
Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-) deceptions.
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A dumbwaiter is a small freight elevator or lift intended to carry food. Dumbwaiters found within modern structures, including both commercial, public and private buildings, are often connected between multiple floors. When installed in restaurants, schools, hospitals, retirement homes or private homes, they generally terminate in a kitchen.
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The Harold Pinter Theatre, known as the Comedy Theatre until 2011, is a West End theatre, and opened on Panton Street in the City of Westminster, on 15 October 1881, as the Royal Comedy Theatre. It was designed by Thomas Verity and built in just six months in painted (stucco) stone and brick. By 1884 it was known as simply the Comedy Theatre. In the mid-1950s the theatre underwent major reconstruction and re-opened in December 1955; the auditorium remains essentially that of 1881, with three tiers of horseshoe-shaped balconies.
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