The playwright who humanised hitmen decades before Pulp Fiction
Decades before Quentin Tarantino humanised hitmen by having them discuss burgers before a kill in Pulp Fiction, Harold Pinter had them in a basement flat talking tabloid news stories in his 1957 work The Dumb Waiter.
Both Tarantino's 1994 movie Pulp Fiction and Pinter's 1957 play set the banal against the brutal, teasing out the humour amid a rising sense of foreboding.
'It's that banality of what's right in front of you, coupled with knowing what's behind it … It makes me … very, very tense, because, you know, it's almost like violence is always lurking,' observes Ensemble Theatre artistic director Mark Kilmurry.
Kilmurry is directing The Dumb Waiter for a Pinter double-header with The Lover in a season beginning at Ensemble next month.
The Dumb Waiter follows the idle conversation between two hitmen, Gus and Ben, who wait in a basement flat for their next job while a dumb waiter (a kind of lift) delivers puzzling food orders to the pair.
Anthony Taufa plays one of the hitmen opposite Gareth Davies, who is on double duties performing The Lover with Nicole da Silva.
'It's killing time, killing people … it is also the idea of doing this so on the regular that this becomes just another day. This is just work, and this is the things that these two people have to do,' Taufa says.
'So I think it's like waiting on a set as well. You're always waiting to do something for like three minutes, then you leave again.'
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