Play: The Dumb Waiter
Programme texts:
• Markus Isch as Gus
• Adrian A. Baumann as Ben
• Matt Kimmich, Director
• Acknowledgments
Reviews:
• Review by Michael Billington
Review by Michael Billington
The Dumb Waiter
It had been a long day. We had been discussing Pinter exhaustively. Frankly, I was tired. Would I get anything out of an evening performance of The Dumb Waiter? I needn't have worried. Within a few seconds I realised that Matt Kimmich's production, staged in an anatomical laboratory at the University of Berne, was made of the right stuff. But first, what kind of play is this? In the 1960s this study of two hit-men, waiting in the basement of a Birmingham house to carry out a contract killing, was seen as deeply Beckettian: a study of two men passing the time in a meaningless universe and subject to the orders of a whimsically cruel Supreme Being. But Pinter himself has said that in early work like The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party and The Hothouse "I was doing something which can, only be described as political." In this play Ben, the nervous conformist, and Gus, the constant questioner, are involved in their own kind of power-struggle; and what becomes clear is that, through the increasingly bizarre orders despatched via the serving-hatch, they are also the victims of a manipulative authority which will divide and ultimately destroy them.
You can argue about the details: at what point, for instance, does Ben realise he has orders to kill Gus? But what I took away from Matt Kimmich's production was a pervasive sense of unease. Adrian A. Baumann's dark-suited Ben, desultorily scanning the pages of a tabloid newspaper, seemed like an Organisation Man haunted by the unorthodox nature of this particular mission. And Markus Isch's fretful Gus suggested a younger colleague driven to question the whole hierarchical structure by the recent killing of a girl ("They don't seem to hold together like men, women. A looser texture, like"). You can do this play very fast so that it seems almost like a comedy routine. Here everything was weighted, fraught, tense with anxiety. I felt as if Ben knew, from the moment he stopped the car en route to the job, that something was up and that Gus was half-aware that no organisation could long tolerate his questioning dissent. Watching this excellent production I was suddenly aware how much The Dumb Waiter, although written in the late 1950s, anticipates Pinter's later more overtly political plays. In works like Party Time and Ashes to Ashes authoritarian figures talk of running "a tight ship". But here, in this exhilarating early work, we see the tight ship from the point of view, as it were, of two luckless stokers below decks: the biddable Ben and the awkward Gus both, as Kimmich's atmospheric and anatomical production made clear, equally doomed.
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