Harold Pinter CH CBE (/ˈpɪntər/; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. 'The Dumb Waiter' by Harold Pinter is a perfectly-formed, one-act play. It was written in 1957. It is generally said that it is the best of the early plays written by Harold Pinter. Pinter's other successful plays are 'The Birthday Party' and 'The Caretaker,' but 'The Dumb Waiter' is said to be more consistent than these plays.

Characters: BEN

Gus

Critically analyze The Dumb Waiter

The drama ‘The Dumb Waiter’ is written by Harold Pinter in 1957. He has written plays for the commercial stage, radio, television as well as film scripts produced by some of the best directors of his time. In the same year, he wrote the one act the Room and The Birthday Party.

This drama ‘The Dumb Waiter’ belongs to the theatre of absurd. Theatre of the absurd is the 20^th century theatre which holds the belief that it is itself in absurd and meaninglessness. Meaninglessness can be represented in the dramatic elements like setting, plot, characters and dialogue.

Setting: Setting refers to the time and space in which the play takes place. In the traditional drama setting sets the mood temperament and environment. Mostly identifiable settings are chosen for the drama but this drama, does not accord with traditional notion of the setting. Ben and Gus are limited to a tiny basement room. All of their activities are limited there. The limitation of the setting in the basement room shows the limitation of the human life itself. Like Ben and Gus, we all are limited in the narrow space. The scene of flushing toilet, reading newspaper, putting on shoes in the room, a serving hatch and having Gyaratte packet are the things which are included in this drama. These things in the setting are unarranged or muddled. From this type of muddled condition, we can claim that this is the drama of the absurdist. The drama begins with the room, goes continuous and ends within the room. From this point of view comparing to our life, it also begins, continues and ends in the circle of space as shown in the drama.

Plot: The plot refers to the order of the events that happen in a play. Plot is “The imitation of the action as well as the arrangement of the incident” for Aristotle. In the traditional drama, plot is made up of recognizable beginning, middle and end. One event is closely linked with the other. But this drama challenges the traditional notion of the plot too. The events are jumbled together. One event has no connection with another event. There are different events like receiving of the newspaper story, arrival of car, receiving and sending the messages, waiting for a girl, discussion of a figurative language and reminiscence of the mother and so on. All those events are not connected with each other and they are narrated frequently and repeatedly. And the plotlessness of the drama reminds us about the plotlessness of the human life. Life is without plot, coherence, sequence, and routine. Things happen randomly there as in the drama an envelope has been put there but having nothing. That means as an empty envelop.

Dialogue: In the traditional drama dialogue is a means for communication. But in this drama, dialogue itself has blocked the communication. The dialogue is laconic and repetitious. For example, Ben asks ‘light the kettle’ to the Gus but Gus does not understand. It is obviously understood that one wants other to do something else. But instead of performing anything they discuss about the nature of this sentence and about who uses and who does not use this cannot be language or dialogue. This formal communication does not move ahead rather it belongs to the question itself. In the Drama the dialogue for example,

The Dumb Waiter Harold Pinter Pdf

BEN – Stand behind the door.

GUS – Stand Behind the door.

BEN – If there is a known on the door you don’t answer it.

GUS – He won’t see you the door I don’t answer it.

BEN – He won’t see me.

Character: “The person presented in a dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as being endowed with particular moral, intellectual and emotional qualities that are expressed in what they say-the dialogue-and by what they do-the action” Abram (1993). In the conventional play characters are life like and they are easily identifiable. At least in the traditional drama we can identify the relationship between the characters. Sometimes we get an impression that Ben and Gus are the two friends who are sharing the same room. But other time they raise the question of senior and junior which destroys our earlier impression. We do not know who is there in upstairs, nor do we know anything about the relationship between the one upstairs and them downstairs.

This absurd drama symbolically represents the nature of the human existence. In the life we all are free to make choices but once we choose life becomes repetitions and that repetitions produces boredom and it is in the state of the boredom there lies in the human existence. Ben and Gus are free in their life and in this free life they want to choose a job. Like the Dumb Waiter they want to follow the orders in this sense they themselves are the Dumb waiter. We all of us are the Dumb waiter.

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The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by Harold Pinter written in 1957.

'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'.^[1]

'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.'^[2]

Plot[edit]

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.

Title[edit]

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.^[3]

Setting[edit]

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.'^[4]

Style[edit]

Pinter's writing in The Dumb Waiter combines 'the staccato rhythms of music-hall cross-talk and the urban thriller'.^[3] 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'.^[4]

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'.^[2]

Interpretation[edit]

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 plays open to interpretation, 'wanting his audience to complete his plays, to resolve in their own ways these irresolvable matters'.^[5] 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'.^[5]

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'.^[6]

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.'^[4] Pinter supported the interpretation of The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter as 'political plays about power and victimisation'.^[3]

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'.^[3] 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'.^[3]

'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'.^[6]

Comedy[edit]

Although the play uses 'the semantic nit-picking that is a standard part of music hall comedy'^[3] and is generally considered funny, this is not comedy for its own sake, but 'a crucial part of the power-structure'.^[3]

'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.'^[7]

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.'^[7]

Performance history[edit]

Frankfurt[edit]

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]

London[edit]

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.

Oxford[edit]

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.

Chicago[edit]

In 2012 The TUTA Theater company presented The Dumb Waiter' ^[10]

Television films[edit]

• 1959 – the play was turned down by the BBC, being considered 'too obscure' for the TV audience.^[5]
• 1985 – Kenneth Ives directed a made-for-TV feature film version of The Dumb Waiter, starring Kenneth Cranham and Colin Blakely, first broadcast by the BBC in July 1985.^[11]
• 1987 – Robert Altman directed a made-for-TV feature film version of The Dumb Waiter, starring John Travolta and Tom Conti, filmed in Canada and first televised in the United States on WABC-TV on 12 May 1987, as part of Altman's two-part series entitled Basements; part one is Pinter's first play The Room.^[12][13][14]

The Dumb Waiter By Harold Pinter Pdf

Notes[edit]

1. ^Derbyshire, Harry. 'Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter (review)', Modern Drama, vol 53, no 2 (2010), pp266-268.
2. ^ ^abGlover, Jamie. 'The Dumb Waiter' (programme notes). The Print Room, 2013.
3. ^ ^abcdefgBillington, Michael. Harold Pinter. Faber & Faber, 2nd edition, 2007, p89 et seq.
4. ^ ^abcCohn, Ruby. 'The World of Harold Pinter', Tulaine Drama Review, 6 (March 1962), pp55-7.
5. ^ ^abcLawford, Cindy. 'The Dumb Waiter (programme notes)'(Web). Retrieved 2 December 2013.
6. ^ ^abBrewer, Mary F. (Ed) 'Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter'. Rodopi, 2009
7. ^ ^abCoppa, Francesca. 'The Sacred Joke: Comedy and Politics in Pinter’s Early Plays', The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
8. ^'Der Stumme Diener (The Dumb Waiter)'(Web). HaroldPinter.org. (Official site of Harold Pinter). Retrieved 1 December 2013.
9. ^'The Dumb Waiter – Premiere'(Web). HaroldPinter.org. (Official site of Harold Pinter). Retrieved 27 June 2008.
10. ^https://www.tutatheatre.org/about-the-dumb-waiter
11. ^The Dumb Waiter at IMDb.
12. ^Basements (1987) (TV) at IMDb. One of two-part series, including a film of Pinter's first play, The Room. Accessed 27 June 2008. [In the United States, this 60-min. film was televised on ABC-TV with Pinter's original title, The Dumb Waiter, as the second of two parts of Altman's two-film series entitled Basements.]
13. ^Andrea LeVasseur (2010). 'Review Summary and Movie Details: The Dumb Waiter'. Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. Baseline & All Movie Guide. Archived from the original on 10 October 2010. Retrieved 27 June 2008. [Rpt. from Allmovie.]
14. ^Andrea LeVasseur. 'Plot Synopsis: The Dumb Waiter'. Allmovie. All Media Guide: allmovie.com. Retrieved 27 June 2008.

References[edit]

Harold Pinter The Dumb Waiter Amazon

• Pinter, Harold. 'The Dumb Waiter', Harold Pinter: Plays One. Faber & Faber, 1991.
• 'The Dumb Waiter (by) Harold Pinter: Plot Overview'. SparkNotes. Barnes & Noble, n.d. Web. 15 January 2009.