It starts, of course it does, with a pause. Two men, both in white shirts and braces, sit in a windowless basement room, furnished only with pockmarked walls and a pair of shabby beds, and wait. And wait. In Harold Pinter’s one-act modern classic The Dumb Waiter (1957), there’s an awful lot of waiting around.
Gus (Joe Armstrong) and Ben (Clive Wood) are waiting in Birmingham, Vladimir and Estragon-style, for someone to get in touch. For a generous helping of the play’s 50-minute duration there is ample comedy in the anticipation; indeed, this is as amusing as I’ve found Pinter in quite some time. The men banter over trivialities, over newspaper articles, cups of tea and football matches (every team is “playing away” on the coming weekend, according to Ben). Armstrong, always an actor of easy geniality, flourishes in particular with this short, sharp, light-footed humour. When an envelope containing matches is mysteriously pushed under the door, Gus is flummoxed only momentarily. After a pause, fraught with uncertainty, he regroups. “Well, they’ll come in handy,” he says.
The silence between the pair’s staccato exchanges nonetheless buzzes with questions. What, exactly, do these men with guns under their pillows do, and for whom? When the dumb waiter on the back wall trundles perplexingly into life, delivering its mechanical demands for a series of ever more elaborate restaurant orders, the mood of actor-turned-director Jamie Glover’s carefully modulated production curdles from anxious joviality through fretfulness to something far darker. An all-encompassing air of menace, as well as a fear of the unseen, descends. Who is upstairs, operating this contraption? Pinter certainly isn’t telling and instead we fill in the gaps with our own particular brand of terrors and nightmares.
Until November 23 (020 7221 6036, the-print-room.org)
