By Mr. Charles Spencer
The Dumb Waiter lasts slightly less than an hour, and with top price tickets selling at £30, that works out at just over 50p a minute.
But you get a real bang for your bucks here, with a wonderfully lean, darkly comic and suspenseful script and cracking performances from that most versatile of comedians, Lee Evans, paired with Jason Isaacs, best known as the sinister Malfoy pere in the Harry Potter films.
Pinter wrote The Dumb Waiter at the start of his career as a dramatist back in 1957, yet almost everything that makes his best work distinctive is already in place, not least the sense of edgy unease and the spare precision of his language, which turns the most banal exchanges into often blackly comic stage poetry.
Half a century ago, Pinter was a rep actor, working in such unglamorous locations as Whitby, Huddersfield, Worthing and Palmers Green and in The Dumb Waiter he seems to be taking gleeful revenge on all the creaky thrillers in which he had to appear.
advertisementOut goes plodding exposition and plot, and in comes a new form of drama in which suspense is created simply through the power of language and the spaces between words, plus the unlikely prop of a service lift.
Two contract killers are waiting in a godforsaken basement in Birmingham for their instructions for that night's hit.
Both are on edge, but the senior operative Ben (Isaacs) hides it much better than his neurotic junior colleague Gus ( Evans) who cannot keep still, keeps going to the loo and rabbits on mindlessly to keep the terrors at bay.
When a dumb waiter crashes unexpectedly into the room (Matt McKenzie's echoing metallic sound effects are tremendous) the tension proves explosive, though it is released in laughter when we discover it contains a prosaic written request for two braised steak and chips, two sago puddings and two teas without sugar.
That order now conjures up the whole drab atmosphere of the 1950s in a dozen words, but the play itself still feels startlingly fresh and sharp, not least in the chilling ingenuity of its final twist.
Harry Burton's production achieves exactly the right mixture of menace and nervy comedy with the help of a splendidly atmospheric set by Peter McKintosh (you can almost smell the rising damp and the dirty sheets on the single beds) and two outstanding performances.
Evans manages to be funny, contemptible and terrified all at the same time as Gus. There is something simian about his awkwardly dangling arms, tilted head and pendulous lower lip, a suggestion of mental sluggishness that doesn't make his fear any less intense.
But he also makes you laugh out loud with his whining catalogue of personal grievances as he prepares to kill.
Isaacs provides the perfect foil as the taciturn Ben, using silence, stillness and sudden shocking violence to create that unpredictable edge of danger that drives so many of Pinter's plays.
The Dumb Waiter may be short, but there is no mistaking its status as a groundbreaking modern classic.
-------------------------------------------------------------
THE DUMB WAITER By Harold Pinter at Trafagar Studios 1
From 2 February Mon - Sat: 7.45pm / Wed & Sat mats: 3.30pm / Box
Office: 0870 060 6632
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
Harold Pinter |
|
Jason Isaacs and Lee Evans in The Dumb Waiter |