February 11, 2007
by Mark Shenton
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Hot on the heels of the dumbing down of a collection of Harold Pinter’s sketches and shorter plays at the hands of TV comedy actors in Pinter’s People, the West End now offers The Dumb Waiter. It may be led by another famous television comedian, but there’s nothing stupid about this show. In fact, the joy of it is just how smart and creatively produced this staging is, intricate in its detail and the minutely calibrated progression of comedy, intrigue, tension and danger that evolves across its short running time. It runs for less than an hour, but whereas Pinter’s People stretched out interminably across an agonising period of double that duration without ever achieving dramatic or comedic impact, The Dumb Waiter offers a much more still, and distilled, fusion of Pinter’s art.
Returning to a play that he also staged a reading of last year as part of the Royal Court’s 50 Readings season, actor-turned-director Harry Burton’s new production is a classic and very classy double act, playing out a sinister dance of death in which an unspoken dread and overpowering sense of foreboding is very much in the air.
In the derelict gloom of a windowless basement room in Birmingham, below what was once a restaurant, two men—Ben and Gus—are playing a waiting game. Ben (Jason Isaacs) is tensely, taciturnly lounging on one of the two grim metal beds that are virtually the only furniture there, reading a newspaper. Occasionally, he shares an anecdote from it with Gus: about a child of eight who killed a cat, for instance, or an 87-year-old man who tries to cross a road by going beneath a lorry and is crushed to death. Gus (Lee Evans), meanwhile, is busying himself with more mundane tasks, like trying to tie his shoelaces and dealing with the obstructions that seem to have been placed inside his shoes.
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What are they doing here? And what are they waiting for? As with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, first published in 1952 and therefore predating this play’s first production in 1959 by some seven years, this is a portrait of two men passing the time while waiting for something to happen. It’s like a comic vaudeville, but one with an edge: violence may not be too far away.
This becomes increasingly apparent as we slowly gather that they’re both hitmen, awaiting instructions from their boss for their next job. Gus asks Ben, who is clearly the one in charge, “Any idea who it’s going to be?” A sealed envelope is suddenly pushed under the door. And then more messages start arriving by way of the dumb waiter—the pulley-operated lift that takes food from the kitchen that this room once was to the restaurant above—with strange lists of food orders. And gradually it gets stranger.
Burton’s
production ratchets up the gathering tension to breaking point. And in Isaacs
and Evans, it has its perfect exponents. As he also demonstrated in Beckett’s
Endgame, Evans can be both effortlessly funny and vulnerable at the same
time. He is one of our most physical comedians, and here he can turn the simple
act of tying his shoelaces into a masterpiece of comic invention. And the
brilliant Isaacs—his face a mask of inscrutability—himself communicates his
mounting irritability and intensity with superb authority. It may be short and
far from sweet, but this is also a brutally powerful evening.
The Dumb Waiter
By Harold Pinter
Directed by Harry Burton
Trafalgar Studios
Photos from the Press Night:
Producer Sonia Friedman congratulates star Jason Isaacs
