The Lover and The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. Ensemble Theatre, Sydney May 2 – June 7 2025.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 10
Director: Mark Kilmurry
Set & Costume Designer: Simone Romaniuk
Lighting Designer: Matt Cox
Composer & Sound Designer: Daryl Wallis
Stage Manager: Lauren Tulloch; Asst Stage Manager: Yasmin Breeze
Cast:
Nicole da Silva; Gareth Davies; Anthony Taufa
Harold Pinter.org
www.haroldpinter.org › plays › plays_lover offers an interesting view of The Lover when it was first presented at the Arts Theatre UK in 1963.
‘Richard’ (husband) or ‘Mark’ (lover) both played with precision by Gareth Davies is English upper middle class to a T. ‘Sarah’ or ‘Whore’ even more so by Nicole da Silva, I thought – partly because I think Pinter gave her opportunities for more varied emotional responses to situations.
But an un-named reviewer in The Financial Times (who perhaps may have attended the same long boring meetings as Richard) wrote in 1963:
“Harold Pinter is [by] far the most original, as he is also the most accomplished, of the younger generation of playwrights. And lately he has added to his other remarkable qualities an extreme formal eloquence. This quality will not, I suppose, endear him to the sterner of my younger colleagues, who regard formal eloquence as a sign of frivolity. They are all for ragged ends edges and untidy ends. But for those with any feeling for shape this addition to Mr. Pinter’s range is an uncommon delight.”
He (I assume all financial journalists were ‘he’ in those days) goes to praise Pinter’s “absolute economy of means to produce a ... precision of effect. The little play works simply beautifully, like a perfectly adjusted piece of miniature machinery; except that machinery is dead and this play is scintillating alive.”
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Gareth Davies as 'Richard' and Nicole da Silva as Sarah in The Lover, Ensemble 2025 |
Mark Kilmurry and his actors, including Anthony Taufa as the milkman in The Lover, have honoured Pinter’s reputation for precision exactly, but what else has Pinter left us with 60 years later?
The idea of risky game-playing between a couple now ten years into their marriage seems to offer a warning – if we feel there needs to be a serious intention behind the play – in just one line. She asks why does he want to stop, and he replies “Because of the children.” I’m not clear whether Pinter meant only a plot device – that is, the sons will be home soon from boarding school – or whether he meant that parents need to stay married without having to play such games, to prevent emotional confusion damaging their children.
Today we would perhaps ask for more on this kind of issue from the most original and accomplished playwright of our younger generation.
And I wonder, too, then, about The Dumb Waiter. Davies and Taufa got their Londoner accents pretty well from the Teddy-Boy parts of the city my father made sure I didn’t go near, and the play makes something out of the idea of political power coming down from above, but my literary studies in its year, 1959, emphasised The Dumb Waiter as a clever writer playing another kind of theatre game – called Absurd Drama.
Not only are the two thugs waiting to kill on the orders from an unknown gangster above their station in criminal society, but they were clearly just a variation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett was in his fifties by now, and Pinter barely 30 – and ready to prove himself as good at absurdism. I still think Beckett was better.
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Gareth Davies and Anthony Taufa in The Dumb Waiter, Ensemble 2025 |
I see plenty of being “all for ragged ends edges and untidy ends” on social media today. Stop it, I say – as I suggest Pinter meant.
Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra