The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter. England’s Harold Pinter is a playwrighting terrorist who can conjure up menace with the easy authority of a Hitchcock. He can also pose Pirandellphic conundrums about the nature of truth and reality. Both Pinters are on view in these off-Broadway one-acters, though neither play possesses the emotional depth and prose poetry of The Caretaker, Pinter’s last-season parable of the human situation.
In The Dumbwaiter, two men, Ben and Gus, loll on iron cots in a mottled green basement room and bandy naggingly repetitive small talk. It gradually becomes apparent that they are two hired gunmen waiting to riddle an unknown victim when he comes through the door. With an ominously metallic rattle, a dumbwaiter suddenly reveals itself behind a false panel in the wall. On it is an order for “two braised steak and chips, two teas without sugar,” followed by a demand for “macaroni pastitsio.” In a nervous swivet, Ben and Gus pile on their own stale snacks. But the machine is insatiable, asking for “one Char Siu and bean-sprouts.” The men shout through a decrepit speaking tube that they have no more. Gus leaves for a drink of water, and the speaking tube instructs Ben to shoot the next man who enters the room.
The door is flung open, and a bloodied Gus staggers in. Ben raises his pistol as the curtain falls—man guiltily ready to do in his fellow man.
The Collection is a distinct novelty for Pinter, a laughing, rather than a frightening, comedy. It is a quadrangular affair.
One pair is man and wife. The other pair is homosexual, an aging dandy and his dress-designer protégé. The question is: Did the protégé sleep with the wife one night during a fashion convention? Armed with the intimate details by his wife, the husband confronts the designer. Incalculably, the two men discover that they are emotionally drawn to each other. This alarms the dandy, who begs the wife to retract her “fantastic” story. She does, and the designer concedes that they only talked about going to bed together. At play’s end, the husband is asking his wife, “That’s the truth . . . isn’t it?” She smiles a Mona Lisa smile. The truth, Pinter seems to say, is chemically unstable, shifting from person to person like solid-to-liquid-to-gas, and hence unknowable in any absolute state.
With The Collection partially excepted, all Pinter plays have a pattern that permits a guess at the enigmatic sources of his strengths and weaknesses. The basic architectural unit of a Pinter play is the room. Terror or violence will invade this room. The powerless, yet inexplicably guilty, occupant will be punished. The plays thus resemble a child’s vision of existence. Like the room, a child’s world is relatively isolated. It can be invaded at any moment by the threats and punishments of dreadfully powerful, yet seemingly unreasonable, grownups. With children, as with Pinter, punishment presumes guilt, and a child takes its guilt on faith, not knowing exactly what will be regarded as goodness or badness. The recourse of the powerless is to be devious and sly, the traditional weapon of women and children. The Pinter hero is endlessly, verbally devious, covering his tracks by reversing his statements; yet language trips him up as it does a child. In The Dumbwaiter, there is an acrimonious exchange about whether one “lights the kettle” or “lights the gas,” a typically childlike confusion in getting the hang of words.
Harold Pinter is a powerfully interesting dramatist, and far more of a playwrighting “natural” than all the British Angries from John Osborne to Shelagh Delaney. In retaining a child’s sense of the world’s mysterious fearsomeness, he taps the adrenal flow of contemporary guilt and anxiety. But to attain full stature as a dramatist, he needs to poke a hole in that sealed nursery-dungeon of fears and take a look at the man-sized world outside.
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