ALSO PLAYING

The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter and The Yalta Game by Brian Friel are two of the short plays in the Gate Theatre’s Pinter/Friel/Beckett festival that runs until March 26. They are short comic/tragic plays exploring ideas briefly, but they both made intriguing viewing with their contrasting views of the world. The Dumb Waiter, typically of Pinter, has a strong political base, disguised as a thriller. On the surface, it’s a comic portrait of two hitmen filling in time as they wait for their victim, arguing and fussing over irrelevant details. But it’s also a disturbing look at how power is used to turn apparently ordinary people into willing tools of an unseen authority whose orders they accept absolutely. Garrett Lombard and Lorcan Cranitch were splendidly balanced as the nervy hitmen. The ending leaves lots of deliberately unanswered questions.

The Yalta Game by Friel, based on the Chekhov short story, The Lady With The Dog, is about the place of imagination in our lives. Dmitri from Moscow, bored with his job and his wife, holidaying alone in Yalta is looking around at the other people, inventing hidden lives for them all. For him life switches between the real and the imaginary, the imaginary being the real life that everyone has but nobody else knows about. He becomes enchanted by Anna, another visitor, equally bored, also looking for a new life. Will the enchantment last? Does it even really exist? Declan Conlon was a splendidly cynical Dmitri. Sophie Robinson, generally good as Anna, had a tendency at times to go from inaudible to screechy.