Harold Pinter:

Gleanings on The Dumb Waiter

K S SIVAKUMARAN

The British playwright Harold Pinter’s thriller, like ‘Absurd Theatre’, is a fascinating drama. It’s called The Dumb Waiter. The play’s focus is the Dumb Waiter. There are two hired killers (Gus and Ben). Some mysterious sources send them to assassinate somebody. An organization has rented out a basement room for the hired killers. Pinter places every day reality and relocates it. The players look old and the disorientation in the play is evident. It is comical but irrational because professional killers are trying to serve fantastic orders for food.

The dialogue in the play is meticulously accurate. Tension in the play is kept up within the dialogue. However the reference to the newspaper is very odd outside the tradition of a thriller. As in many Absurd Theatre plays, in Pinter’s too, the meanings in his dialogues are not immediately clear. This is because we need to have a philosophical understanding of realities such as Existentialism. T S Eliot once said that ‘Poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness’, but in Pinter, sometimes meaning seems to fail. His characters seem to live on these frontiers. He shares many qualities with the ‘social realists’.

“Pinter offers no solution to conflicts and tension in his characters. Problems exist not to be solved so much as to release the character of the impulses towards the frontiers of consciousness. But the consciousness does not do that as it cannot exclude a critical awareness of the impact of a material world on every day reality. There is a bewildered uneasy recognition of reality in this play” (G K Haththotewegama, pioneer street theatre proponent and an academic).

If we read Harold Pinter’s plays, especially The Dumb Waiter, we find that he creates characters that are at the extreme edge of living where they are very much alone, but the isolation is not as far as and as complete as Samuel Beckett makes it out to be in his drama.

In this play non-verbal passages reveal even symbolic meanings in the midst of seemingly realistic action. For example the silence and the use of the lift can be spotted.

Symbol of the room is also central to Pinter. The room has no windows. It has one door opening out into the unknown and another into a defective lavatory. This basement room is part of a hotel. On the side of it is a ‘service lift’ or elevator. But we are not sure whether the hotel is functioning in the normal sense, or if it is an imaginary device, though orders for food come through this.

The two characters, Ben and Gus, don’t look real or normal since the play is ‘Absurd’ - a kind of drama not in vogue now. When Gus, one of the hired killers steps outside this room he loses his gun and is doomed to die. But it is interesting, the menace which Pinter is always fond of bringing in is not merely something which comes from outside the security of the room, but it is present in the room itself.

The plot is that there are two characters - Ben and Gus. They are friends and coworkers Ben is an agent for an organization. The room is rented out by the organization. Ben waits outside the room to get rid of Gus.

J R Taylor has remarked that Pinter has a habit of creating a light intricate texture full of overtures, reminiscences and unexpected resonance (repeated utterances, repeated a verbal pattern and line from the newspaper) Pinter gives meticulous attention to pauses which are carefully orchestrated.

Not everything is negative; there are positive qualities too in Printer’s outlook: affirmation of the human spirit. If we look at the character development through the plot structure, we will find the critical questioning of Gus is a beginning to understand the necessity to overcome. Ben’s portrayal is more subtle than Gus’. Ben is the voice and agent of the organization.

He is a passively functioning entity driven to keep (discipline) the other person (Gus) in the service of the organization. Feeling the strain is the other dimension of Ben.

Because he has to get rid of his companion, he feels very uncomfortable and suppresses his feelings.

This does not the damage the play substantially. Pinter’s other play the Birthday Party was not as mysterious as this play.

It is a dramatization of the fate of an organization which exploites and victimizes when necessary for their purposes. Whether we would like the play or not such a play is compulsory study in understanding British English Literature and Writing in general.