Two one-act Harold Pinter plays starring three actors across five roles for a total of two hours entertainment plus intermission – if we judged theatre by weight, that’d sound like a pretty good deal. And it is, because you tend to get more than you expect from Ensemble Theatre, and certainly from Pinter, if you’re not ready for him.
The relatively confined space of the Ensemble stage is a good fit for Pinter’s drawing room dreadfuls. The fact that we’re getting a double feature – a twofer! – speaks to the Music Hall traditions underpinning Pinter’s work, the way he was keyed to the rhythms of working class and middle class voices. It’s also the first hint that this is Pinter-as-comedy, although it’s still the comedy of menace. Pinter was the most mercurial of the angry young men who barreled through mid-20th-century British culture, and his work invites diverse interpretations. Here, director Mark Kilmurry has leaned into laughs, although often rueful.
The Lover (1962) puts us in the ’60s-chic suburban home of housewife Sarah (Nicole da Silva – The Memory of Water, TV’s Wentworth) and businessman Richard (Gareth Davies – Benefactors, Belvoir’s The Master And Margarita) as they exchange pleasantries and also frank details of their extra-marital affairs. She has a lover, Max, who visits while Richard is at work. Richard admits to frequenting an anonymous whore (his words) for after-office dalliances. Then we meet Max – and Max, is Richard.
The Lover is a brittle, nervy satire of the mores, sexual and otherwise, of the British middle class of the time. Da Silva’s Sarah and Davies’ Richard speak in the clipped, well-modulated tones of their station, and their delivery cleverly maps the “Pinter pause” to the patterns of sitcom dialogue delivery (Pinter pausing for laughter, perhaps?). At times it feels like a particularly perverse episode of The Good Life, as we parse that plaintive Richard is engaged in a roleplay he’s clearly not comfortable with. However, beneath the sex comedy juxtaposition of lewd behaviour against quotidian life is a keen examination of the power dynamics within their relationship, as each exchange between the couple alters our understanding of their deal.
We get a different kind of pair in The Dumb Waiter (1957) as two hitmen, senior partner Ben (Gareth Davies, completely transformed) and young gun Gus (Anthony Taufa, who crops up briefly in The Lover as a milkman) wait in a drab basement (Simone Romaniuk’s clever set dressing is a stand out) to carry out their next assignment. Meanwhile, they bicker over tea, over crockery, over the less enjoyable parts of their profession, and over their place in the grand scheme of things. They also argue over the food orders that keep arriving in the titular dumb waiter – even though, this is clearly not a restaurant kitchen.
The Dumb Waiter is more explicitly about power than The Lover. In our current political climate, it’s tempting to say it’s more explicitly about fascism, and about what blind fidelity to a hierarchy can compel us to commit atrocities. It is also more overtly abstract – whereas The Lover alludes to the existence of a more conceptual dimension when domestic Richard first appears as the raffish Max, The Dumb Waiter’s casual surrealism lets it state its metaphors more plainly.
Of the two, The Dumb Waiter packs the bigger punch, with its ironic workplace humour gradually giving way to a steadily rising sense of anxiety and unease, perfectly complemented by Daryl Wallis’ unsettling sound design. But the domesticity of The Lover’s’ setting sharpens the barbs and deepens the layers hidden in its carefully balanced exchanges – and boasts a perfectly pitched comic performance from da Silva. How lucky, then, that we don’t have to choose. What a bargain.
The Lover & The Dumb Waiter are playing at Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, until June 7. Find tickets and info over here.
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