First-half triumph puts Dyer and Freeman in the shade
Pinter 7: A Slight Ache; The Dumb Waiter Harold Pinter Theatre
We’ve reached the end of the line and it’s now safe to declare that Pinter at the Pinter has proved a logistical and artistic triumph: all 20 short plays penned by the Nobel Prize-winning colossus delivered by star-studded casts over an accumulatively rewarding five-month spree. Still to come by way of deluxe coda, there’s a major revival of Betrayal (1978) starring Tom Hiddleston, but we should pause, at length, to applaud director Jamie Lloyd and co.
Even though the finale, neatly pairing the 1958 radio play A Slight
Ache with the better known 1957 two-hander The Dumb Waiter, brings things to a less rousing climax than one might have hoped, it exemplifies the dedication that has been a hallmark of the season. And it further confirms the impression that the earliest work contains Pinter’s most fecund and richly peculiar imaginings, besides which the later, more overtly politically charged miniatures can look desiccated.
The slight let-down of the evening, in part because it’s so pumped up, is The Dumb Waiter for which two big guns, Danny Dyer and Martin Freeman, have been wheeled out. Of all the actors recruited so far, Dyer is the one who arguably comes with the biggest seal of authorial approval. Pinter was something of a mentor to Dyer and the latter reciprocated last month when, on receiving a gong for his performance as the Queen Vic’s landlord Mick Carter in Eastenders at the National Television Awards, he dedicated his win to him.
It’s possible that once the pressures of the opening week subside, this rough diamond will come into his own in the role of Ben – the more forbidding of two hitmen holed up in a dank basement awaiting the arrival of their (unknown to them) victim. He’s got the bulk, the stubble, the accent and the swagger to convince as a thug-for-hire; yet there’s more surface style than inner steel here.
He’s at his best doing least, initially commanding as he lies on a makeshift bed, testily distracted from a paper by Freeman’s jittery inquiries as Gus. Granted, both are pushed to a state of fluttering uncertainty by the comically incongruous requests for food that descend, crashingly, in a (presumed extinct) dumb waiter. But Dyer makes a meal of things; when he looms over his accomplice in a bout of bickering cross-talk over his use of the phrase “light the kettle”, the threat seems toothless. And I’ve seen primary school teachers with more grit to them than Freeman’s Gus, whose fretful eagerness marks him as the odd man out.
Perhaps Lloyd – who stokes the macabre atmosphere with lots of shadow-play – should have reversed the running order, helping ease the pressure of expectation; as it is, it’s more filler than killer. By contrast, the opener, A Slight Ache, should leave aficionados and uninitiated alike in seventh heaven.
Staged here as if being broadcast from a radio studio – with microphones, script-stands and an area for DIY sound effects – it envelops the audience in a pungent expression of marital and mental disintegration. As with The Dumb Waiter, the catalyst for engulfing derangement is a “mute” third party – a silent, watching “match-seller” lurking outside the country home of middle-class marrieds Flora and Edward.
In a wonderfully clipped and nuanced double act, Gemma Whelan and John Heffernan establish diverging attitudes of dawning feminine arousal and growing male hysteria that bring the usurping stranger (never seen) into their realm and matters to a head. If any of his playlets bring home Pinter’s line about his work being about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet”, here it is. It’s like watching a Coward comedy strapped into a straitjacket and bundled into an asylum cell.