Harold Pinter: The Dumb Waiter

Cristina Gonzlez Angs 2014/15

Was born

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930 and died in 2008.

Pinter grew up in a solid working-class environment, the only child of a Jewish tailor. His extended families
played an important role in his upbringing.

Some of the members of his mother's family engaged in criminal activities and one of his uncles was a
bare-knuckle boxer, while his father's relatives were interested in music, art and literature.
These opposing points of view would be an essential feature of his plays, especially in his later works.
Influences

The

effects of Pinter's evacuation as a child during the Second World War were also to be of

considerable relevance to his artistic development.

The recurrent feelings of entrapment and claustrophobia which are displayed by the protagonists of
many of his plays are likely to stem from this traumatic separation from his parents.

The bombing of his neighbourhood, the East of London, also made a huge impact on Pinter, no doubt
fostering the idea that surfaces in his texts that violence is not only inevitable, but always a threat.
It is not clear to what extent the Holocaust and its aftermath affected the playwright nor how important
Holocaust in

his Jewishness was to his work. Many of his plays are about motiveless persecution which is no doubt a

Pinte's plays??? reaction to this experience as a youth, however Pinter tends to play down the repercussion of his ethnicity,
favouring a more universal interpretation of his work.

After a year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he chose to drop out of school and dedicate his time
to reading, writing and acting.

When he was drafted, he registered as a conscientious objector and was imprisoned for a short period of
time.
His life

At age twenty-six he met the actress Vivien Merchant and they were married.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 and is considered one of the most original and
challenging of the dramatists who emerged towards the end of the 1950's. He was the author of more than
thirty plays, twenty-one screen plays, and director of twenty-seven theatre productions.

In his later artistic and vital period, Pinter became a political activist, campaigning against the War in
Iraq and taking almost every opportunity to make pronouncements on current affairs, especially denouncing
U.S. politics.
The Dumb Waiter
Pinter's writing career essentially began with the performance of The Room in 1957. This same year, The
His influence

Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party were written. All three of these reveal the immense impact that
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952) had on the young playwright, which is especially poingnant in
his representation of the relationship between Gus and Ben in The Dumb Waiter.

Pay careful
attention to

The way in which the characters are constructed through language and the absence of it.
The possible sub-texts that can be extracted.
The way in which the writer creates ambiguity in order to force his readers to ultimately reach their own
conclusions.

Pinter's dialogue - or lack of it - echoes Beckett's strategic use of repetition and pauses.
The true nature of their characters emerges just as much from what they do not say as from what they
do.

Dialogue
/Language

Silences are ominous and threatening, and often foreshadow a violent denouement.
The utilisation of language is in fact so unique that the word "Pinteresque" has been coined to refer to
the dialogues which camouflage a menacing situation, a world he creates full of silence and repressed
violence. For this reason, his plays have often been called "Comedies of Menace".

The

frequent use of pauses within his dialogues has come to be considered such an outstanding

characteristic of his work that at times it has been the subject of parody and mockery.

Another

characteristic is the exploitation of difference in the awareness of characters upon the

stage.
Ben and Gus are hired killers, waiting for Wilson to give them instructions regarding their next "job". The
element of uncertainty is introduced from the very beginning of the story. We ask ourselves who they are,
where they are and what they are doing there. Teh two protagonists, Ben and Gus, engage in a
converstation which is defined through a series of pauses and repetitions that are in turn aided by
seemingly harmless and insignificant props. It becomes immediately evident that of the two men Gus is the
Plot

most submissive and insecure. Ben, on the other hand, emits an aura of intimidation and violence, using
silence as a means of domination.
In some parts of the play, to Gus's worried questioning, Ben responds either by referring to sordid news
items or with repressed anger and emotional vacuity. When the dumb waiter is introduced, the dialogue
shifts away from the two men who are now confronted with and have to communicate with the unknown
person at the end of the shaft.

Categorization

Pinter's plays have been categorised by some critics as "Theatre of non-communication".

They are in Birmingham and apparently, it is Friday because Gus wants to watch the Birmingham soccer
team tomorrow (Saturday)

Ben reports to Gus some newspapers articles:

1. a newspaper article which reports on an elderly man who tried to cross a busy street by crawling under
the truck, which then ran over him.
2. an article about a child who kills a cat.
Details of the
play

They find a box on a dumb waiter. Then, they find a intercom tube.
The play is set in the basement of a caf and Wilsom may be who own it.
There is a picture on the wall of cricket players entitled "The First Eleven" - Neither he nor Ben knows
that the "first eleven" refers to a school's top cricket players.

There is numerous similarities and allusions to Beckett's Waiting for Godot .

Themes: The silence and violence of language; anxiety over social class.
Motifs: Repetition.
Symbols: The dumb waiter - serves a a symbol for the broken, one-sided communication between Gus and
Ben. They do not speak with, but to each other.
Gus - a submissive junior hit man who is constantly bossed around by Ben.
Ben - the senior hit man. He runs their outfit, but pays strict attention to the demands of Wilson, their
Characters

boss.
Wilson - a mysterious figure, the boss of Gus an Ben. He never shows up but he messages from the dumb
waiter may be from him.

The Theatre of the Absurd, a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin to describe the work of a number
of playwrights, mostly written between 1950s and 1960s. This type of theatre was influenced by several
The Theatre of factors among which we can point out the traumatic experience of the horrors of the Second World War
the Absurd

and the reaction to the disappearance of the religious dimension from contemporary life.
But the Theatre of the Absurd is also a rebellion against conventional theatre, that is, it breaks the
conventions of classic drama. Thats why some authors have labeled it New Theatre or Anti-Theatre.
In his book The Theatre of the Absurd , written in 1972, Martin Esslin revises the main characteristics of
the Theatre of the Absurd pointing out, as the most outstanding features, to

the lack of action or plot

its purposelessness
the absurd or comic situation at the end of the play
Main
the presentation of a world which cannot be logically explained.
characteristics
Objects are much more important than language in absurd theatre.

of the Theatre
of the Absurd

He also stresses the fact that the characters are very little described or not describe at all, and that
the conversation between them lacks meaning and sense, that is, there is a distrust of language as a
means of communication.
Pinters dialogues camouflage a menacing situation full of repressed violence and this is the reason why his
plays have been also called Comedies of Menace.