Less is more and this is just right
One way of reading these two early Harold Pinter masterpieces is as plays about objects. The Dumb Waiter (1957) features the food-service lift of the title, plus a speaking tube in an important role. Two gangsters in a seedy Birmingham hotel await instructions as the little lift creaks into action, conveying cryptic instructions from some unseen master.
The Lover (1962) is, in some ways, a play about blinds - open to let the bright glare of sunlight in on the afternoon trysts that the wife has with her lover, or closed to shut out the illuminating day.
With the first play, you can tease out various metaphors. The waiter conveys text, often increasingly complex orders for food, but indeed does not speak.
The two gangsters, Ben (Andrew Broderick) and Gus (Michael Burge), are functionaries dependent on the whims of others. They certainly look like waiters, in their black pants, white shirts and suspenders. They are also none too bright, and the main activity of the play is waiting.
In The Lover, the opening line sets the scene beautifully. “Is your lover coming today?” asks Richard (Bill Conn) politely of his wife Sarah (Lynne McGranger). The lover is indeed coming, so Richard will have to work late again.
Sarah’s lover comes over a lot, and despite the work’s status as a classic, it would be wrong to give away its delicious twist. Suffice to say this is another of Pinter’s hermetic worlds, where boredom works in mysterious ways and one of the main tasks is to prevent the fragile seedling of fantasy from withering in the glare of reality.
Performances in this Acting Factory production are strong across the board. Burge’s Gus is a wonderful neurotic in his odd obsessions and nicely contrasted with Broderick’s older and dominant Ben.
Both McGranger and Conn do a wonderfully empty and emotionally stunted version of the happy bourgeois marriage. McGranger is extraordinary when simply reshuffling the knick-knacks of status, and the difficult drum scene is beautifully played, both comedic and strangely erotic.
Director Sherreen Hennessy keeps Dumb Waiter in its time and place - the London patois of the thugs’ chit-chat demands this, while Fiona Press relocates The Lover to contemporary Australia.
Both plays speak strongly to our own time and obsessions and shine here in well-acted and directed versions. Certainly as lessons in the dramatic role of mystery, of truth, of the dictum “less is more”, old Harold still has much to teach writers aspiring to the Pinteresque.
Stephen Dunne, Sydney Morning Herald, 28/8/04