The ‘lover’ and the ‘dumb waiter’ sound like a gag. You could imagine the lover and waiter meeting in a comic sketch and maybe running away together. Mark Kilmurry, Ensemble Theatre’s experienced Artistic Director, has cleverly programmed British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter’s pair of one-act plays as a double bill.
The Lover (written in 1962, originally for television) and The Dumb Waiter (1957) are an ideal match. Seemingly disparate, the plays share an unnerving dark humour, masterful interactions between the actors and themes of waiting, inertia and change, and playing the game. They also form a sharp contrast to each other.
Both titles are ambiguous. Who is the lover? Who or what is the dumb waiter? Both plays expose an unravelling. In the first play, the lovers’ titillating game falters. In the second play, the two hitmen’s ‘setup’ reveals deepening cracks. Both plays are character-based and (apart from a brief appearance by a milkman in The Lover) are two-handers.
Nicole da Silva (television programs Wentworth and Bump) is an effervescent, alluring Sarah in The Lover. Chameleon-like Gareth Davies (The Master and Margarita, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) mesmerisingly inhabits the character of Sarah’s husband, Richard. They circle each other with flirtatious glances, banter and fleeting physical touch. She tells him about her afternoons with her lover. He has a whore. Their games as a married couple and role-playing as lovers implode as their power imbalance seesaws.
Davies, who reappears as cocky, knowing Ben in The Dumb Waiter, controls all the power in the second play. He and his hired gun, Gus, played by Anthony Taufa (Black is the New White, Home, I’m Darling), are waiting Godot-like in a bleak room that serves as a holding place. Gus, a large, clueless but endearing clown-like figure, admires the crockery and wants a cup of tea. Already uncomfortable, he is thwarted when, embodying the alienation of the building, the gas disconnects. The men seem dumbfounded by the clunky mechanical dumb waiter, which erratically delivers slips of paper with strange food orders. Its clanking ascents and descents are deliberately jarring.
Daryl Wallis’s sound design and composition add to the foreboding atmosphere. Noise from the dumbwaiter contraption and the cistern water are disconcerting. The percussive music and seductive, relentless drumming of the bongos in The Lover unsettle. The chiming clock of the first play is repeated at a lower pitch early in the second to cement the two plays’ cohesiveness.
Simone Romaniuk’s set design for both productions heightens the atmosphere. Although the lounge room of The Lover appears cosy, its geometric wallpaper patterning and stripes, particularly those reflected as diagonal lines from the Venetian blind, create an atmosphere of turmoil to represent the couple’s dysfunctional relationship. The décor of blue and orange characterises their conflicting emotions of cool distance and hot passion.
The colour and texture of The Lover make way for minimalism in The Dumb Waiter. Furniture is stripped back to two single beds and a chair. Set, costumes and props are toned in grim greyscale. Doorways and apertures are carefully modified between the plays to remain purposeful and symbolic. Nothing is extraneous. The small stage helps to create the claustrophobic intimacy of both plays.
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The direction, acting and staging coalesce to execute the plays as a fresh tribute to Pinter’s style of absurdist satire.
The unanswered question, “What’s he playing these games for?” that Gus poses in The Dumb Waiter singularly covers both plays. The audience is kept laughing and on the edge of their seats while confronted with the perversely entertaining threats of betrayal and entrapment. The power of theatre here reminds us that anyone may risk becoming ensnared and implicated by ‘the game’.
The Lover and The Dumb Waiter
Playwright: Harold Pinter
Director: Mark Kilmurry
Set and Costume Designer: Simone Romaniuk
Lighting Designer: Matt Cox
Composer and Sound Designer: Daryl Wallis
Dialect Coach: Linda Nicholls-Gidley
Intimacy Coordinator: Chloë Dallimore
Stage Manager: Lauren Tulloh
Assistant Stage Manager: Yasmine Breeze
Costume Supervisor: Sara Kolijn
Cast: Nicole da Silva, Gareth Davies and Anthony Taufa
Tickets: $43-$90
Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli
2 May – 7 June 2025
