The Dumb Waiter/A Slight Ache

This evening consisting of two Harold Pinter one act plays certainly kept the audience thinking throughout, and afterwards.  Pinter’s works can appear a little odd at times and perhaps these plays are no exception.

The Dumb Waiter is set in a basement room, beneath what was apparently a former café, and containing two beds, a kitchen and bathroom, along with a “dumb waiter” used for transporting food orders from the downstairs kitchen to the café.  Little information is given to the audience but throughout there was an atmosphere of menace as two hit men await instructions regarding their next target.

The characters are Ben and Gus, both armed, and the latter spends his time asking mundane questions of Ben who gradually begins to lose patience, resulting in silly arguments.  The “dumb waiter” is here used for the sending of fictitious food orders to the hit men and they end up sending up their own snack food.  There was also a voice tube alongside the elevator to allow instructions to be given verbally.

A play such as this demands strong performances and both parts were extremely well played by William Stanforth as Ben, the senior partner, and Kenneth Davison as Gus, his supposed side kick.  Their timing and use of silences were superb which only added to the tension.  Mention should also be made of the excellently executed ups and downs of the “dumb waiter”.

The close of the play again kept us guessing as to whether the target of the assignment was, in fact, Gus.  We thought so but….!

A Slight Ache was perhaps a little harder to understand and this tragi-comedy, apparently originally written for radio, certainly made us ponder.

The plot centres on a married couple who have dreams and desires which are fully aired with an underlying fear of the unknown and of getting older.  Their lives are affected by the appearance outside their property of a match seller, dressed in rags and a balaclava.  Who is he, does he really exist? 

The match seller is invited into the home and both husband and wife take the opportunity to talk to the man alone.  The husband, Edward, a pompous, single minded and bigoted man, eventually seems to view the visitor as his own past self.  The wife, Flora, begins to see the stranger as the husband she once had and loved, at the same time realising what he had become.  Fears and frustration overtake both characters.

Edward was played by Graham Beeston and Flora by Pat Davison and both were excellent, each excelling in their long passages of dialogue.  The match seller, dialogue free, was performed by Richard Stiles and he made good use of his eyes and posture.

We were probably none the wiser at the end of the performance as to the reality of things but, as with the opening production, the audience retained their interest throughout and discussed enthusiastically at the end their varying personal views of Pinter’s plots but being collectively well impressed with what they had witnessed.

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