The Dumb Waiter
“BEN slams down the paper.
BEN. Kaw !
He picks up the paper.
What about this? Listen to this !
He refers to the paper.
A man of eighty-seven wanted to cross the road. But there was a lot of traffic, see ? He couldn’t see
how he was going to squeeze through. So he crawled under a lorry.
GUS. He what ?
BEN. He crawled under a lorry. A stationary lorry.
GUS. No ?
BEN. The lorry started and ran over him.
GUS. Go on !
BEN. That’s what it says here.
GUS. Get away.
BEN. It’s enough to make you want to puke, isn’t it ?
GUS. Who advised him to do a thing like that ?
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Ravi Gunawardane
B.A (en) University of Kelaniya
DETE – University of Colombo
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BEN. A man of eighty-seven crawling under a lorry !
GUS. It’s unbelievable.
BEN. It’s down here in black and white.
GUS. Incredible.”
This one-act play takes place in a basement room which seems to be underneath some kind of restaurant. We can guess this because in the back of the stage is a dumb waiter which periodically brings food to the two actors on stage, which from time to time they also comment on. The set up is that these two characters, one a little more senior than the others, are apparently hit men waiting for the right moment for their next job. The job is somewhat of a mystery to them, but they do spend a little time planning it out. The rest of the play is spent arguing mostly about numerous different things. One clue to some of the mystery of the play is their arguing about how one asks to boil the water for tea. Specifically, they are arguing about the language being used to make this request. One says “Put the kettle on” which the other is vehemently opposed to, and he says “light the kettle”. They also argue about gas, and this too follow similar enough lines here. I feel like the heart of this argument, about what language does and says, and what it’s limits are are key here. Especially since the title of the play, the dumb waiter, applies to multiple different possible things in the play, including to one or both of the men.
The Collection
“James: Got any olives?
Bill: How did you know my name?
James: No olives?
Bill: Olives? I’m afraid not.
James: You mean to say you don’t keep olives for your guests?
Bill: You’re not my guest, you’re an intruder.
What can I do for you?”
This is a kind of horror play in a way, about doubt and the inability to know something. We begin with a phone call in the early morning, which wakes up one of the characters. Later, a man shows up at a house demanding to speak to the owner. What eventually shakes out is that the older man is the husband of a woman who has recently returned from a trip to Leeds. She has confessed to infidelity while in Leeds and implicated the owner of the house (and also the recipient of the phone call). Through the conversation the man who was in Leeds begins by saying nothing happened, eventually says there was some kissing, and eventually discusses how he and the woman spent a large amount of time in the lobby discussing what would happen if they did have an affair. But the incongruity of these different scenarios (however likely they are and however blended of the three the truth might be, including definitions about “nothing happened”) are not the issue here, the issue is the breakdown in language to function in the husband’s brain to make what he thinks, wants or believes happened happened, especially using the language that he has used to make it work. The situation here is like a man trying to map an schema of the actuality of a situation onto the way that he conceived it, and is more adamant to fix the misalignment than to worry about the specific truth.
Moonlight
In this one-act play, a man lies dying on his bed as various people in his life visit him. As he discusses elements of his life, there’s a growing sense that what he believed to life to contain is not held equally in belief from those others around him.
There’s this outsized sense of the importance of a deathbed scene. This obviously applies very much to literature, and there’s obviously been numerous famous deathbed scenes like Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Valentin in Henry James’s The American, and of course Beth in Little Women, to the point that it’s a point of contention and dark humor in the more recent novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. And so taking this moment, and deconstructing it a little bit feels ripe for a play. A lot Pinter’s plays take on those little scenes of tropic familiarity or language usage and press on them to try to figure out not only how they work, but why we insist they work a certain way.
The Room
In The Room a married couple sharing a small room are having an argument about their surroundings, the like of which they’ve had many times before.
Think back on the worst place you’ve ever lived, especially if it was a rental headed up by some kind of corrupt landlord. I recently lived in two not great houses, but with decent enough landlords. So the issues of the houses (too cold, too hot, things breaking) were more or less fine given that I felt I could rely on someone dealing with them. A place being cheap also goes a long way to fixing issues with it. But three times have I had the experience of a place being so bad and so almost dystopically run that I felt completely out of control and deeply depressed by the experience. One place was freezing cold, full of mold, and had gaps in the bottom of the doors so large that bugs just walked in, and not always tiny bugs. The landlord was aggressively corrupt as well. One place was full of mice, and the landlord was completely absent. The last place was full of mice, and the landlord was always finding ways to extract more money from the house (like sealing off a living room to turn into another bedroom (it was a kind of grad student flop house). So there was a lot more money extracted and no money put into making it a livable place.
The Lover
The Lover presents the question of how exactly to stage the play, as a central plot point (which I won’t mention) requires a director to decide exactly how many different actors to cast. We begin with a husband and a wife discussing things and they casually begin mentioning their various lovers and affairs. This is not exactly a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf kind of things, but also not not that. There’s a layer of ire, but it’s not the full story, but there’s also no underlying sense of sadness about things. Everything is actually quite matter of fact really. So the tension builds in the story as we know that we will be getting a visit from the title character at some point.
I’ve never spent a lot of time in the realm of infidelity, and I think that’s probably a good thing. Old novels and movies really make it seem (and so do plenty of real life moments) really common and quotidian, but that’s not ever been my experience. Any relationship I’ve been in in which infidelity popped up it either happened in very small ways early on, or was the last leg of a short-lived thing. So I’ve never been in that space of “living” with it as it happens in so many stories.
