Sex, lies and hitmen: What more could you want?

The Age

08-05-2025

THEATRE
THE LOVER & THE DUMB WAITER
Ensemble Theatre, May 7. U ntil June 7
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
You know when you walk in on an existing conversation, and automatically try to connect threads of what's being said? These two one-act plays by Harold Pinter are similar to that. No playwright was more influenced by Samuel Beckett, yet where Beckett gave us glimpses of universality, Pinter honed in on specifics, like looking at life through a keyhole. Those specifics are then shrouded in enigmas for the audience to decipher.
Directed by Mark Kilmurry with a fine ear and eye, The Lover (1962) and The Dumb Waiter (1957) are ideally mated both in terms of those enigmas, and also pragmatically, needing just three actors between them. That The Lover, originally penned for television, is marginally the lesser piece is down to the other's complete enthrallment.
The Lover concerns a married couple, Sarah (Nicole da Silva) and Richard (Gareth Davies), who matter-of-factly discuss her afternoon liaisons with her lover, Max, and his dalliances with a sex worker. Except Max is really Richard, and the sex worker is really Sarah: they playact for sexual titillation, which puts them on shaky ground. What if one of them breaks the game's unspoken rules?
Written by anyone else, it would be a straightforward comedy satirising the bored bourgeoisie, but Pinter deepens the shadows of each word. Da Silva and especially Davies skilfully play the piece ever so lightly, while implying this element of danger, whereby the game-playing could spiral towards a point of no return. It's akin to watching two domesticated cats who could turn feral.
But for combining tension with comedy, The Dumb Waiter, with its overt debt to Waiting for Godot, is supreme, and in just a few minutes during the interval, Simone Romaniuk's ingenious set is transformed from 60s swinging suburbia to the desolation and mould of a twin-bed basement which also has a dumb waiter – a miniature lift for delivering meals via a hatch in the wall.
Ben (Gareth Davies, playing his third role, effectively) and Gus (Anthony Taufa) are hitmen, holed up in the room waiting for instructions on their next target. Despite Ben just lying on a bed reading a newspaper ('87-year-old man crawls under stationary lorry and is run over'; 'eight-year-old girl kills cat') and Gus being busy finding squashed matches and cigarettes in his shoes, Ben is swiftly established as the boss; Gus the underling.
Davies, half the size of Taufa, is exceptional at conveying a menace and snappish temper from which Gus shrinks. Similarly, Taufa catches Gus' odd quality of being a bit thick, and yet having enough warmth and emotional and moral intelligence to be afflicted with a conscience.