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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.
Jason Isaacs is an English actor. He is best known for his portrayal Colonel William Tavington in The Patriot (2000), Michael D. Steele in Black Hawk Down (2001), Captain Hook in Peter Pan (2003), James Wolfe in Battle of the Brave (2004), Antonio Pérez in The Escorial Conspiracy (2007), Georgy Zhukov in The Death of Stalin (2017) and John Godfrey in Operation Mincemeat (2021).
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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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The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 and published in 1965 by Harold Pinter. Its premières in London (1965) and New York (1967) were both directed by Sir Peter Hall. The original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play. Its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival of a Play".
The Room is Harold Pinter's first play, written and first produced in 1957. Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace", this play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called Pinteresque: dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy; a plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.
Butley is a play by Simon Gray set in the office of an English lecturer at a university in London, England. The title character, a T. S. Eliot scholar, is an alcoholic who loses his wife and his close friend and colleague – and possibly male lover – on the same day. The action of the dark comedy takes place over several hours on the same day during which he bullies students, friends and colleagues while falling apart at the seams. The play won the 1971 Evening Standard Award for Best Play.
Alan Schneider was an American theatre director responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights. He directed the 1956 American premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice; the American première of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, as well as Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, The Collection, and a trilogy of Pinter's plays under the title Other Places ; Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle; You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running; and Michael Weller's Moonchildren and Loose Ends.
Tea Party is a play written by Harold Pinter, which Pinter adapted from his own 1963 short story of the same title. As a screenplay, it was commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union, directed by Charles Jarrott, and first transmitted on BBC Television in the programme The Largest Theatre in the World on 25 March 1965. It was first produced on stage in October 1968 as part of a double bill with Pinter's play The Basement.
Bibliography for Harold Pinter is a list of selected published primary works, productions, secondary sources, and other resources related to English playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who was also a screenwriter, actor, director, poet, author, and political activist. It lists works by and works about him, and it serves as the Bibliography for the main article on Harold Pinter and for several articles relating to him and his works.
"Art, Truth and Politics" is the Nobel Lecture delivered on video by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter (1930–2008), who was at the time hospitalised and unable to travel to Stockholm to deliver it in person.
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Remembrance of Things Past is the 2000 collaborative stage adaptation by Harold Pinter and director Di Trevis of Harold Pinter's as-yet unproduced The Proust Screenplay (1977), a screen adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu, the 1913–1927 seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust.
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.
The Basement is a television play by Harold Pinter. It was written first as a screenplay for a film, then revised for television and broadcast on 20 February 1967.
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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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