The Dumb Waiter

Pinter’s short, surreal gangster thriller is perfectly suited to the social distancing era: so much so that the Old Vic’s ‘The Dumb Waiter’ isn’t even the first London production of it since the pandemic started, with a well-received production running at Hampstead Theatre just before Christmas. This is a bit different, though: Jeremy Herrin’s production of the 1957 classic about two hitmen hiding out in a strange basement will run for just one week as the (one would assume final) entry in the Old Vic’s In Camera series of shows performed on its stage for a paying global audience. The big difference here, however, is that there’ll be a socially distanced live audience too, there to see Daniel Mays and David Thewlis as bickering hitmen Gus and Ken.