By John Shand
THEATRE
THE LOVER & THE DUMB WAITER
Ensemble Theatre, May 7. Until 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.
Gareth Davies and Nicole da Silva in The Lover.Credit: Prudence Upton
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.
Gareth Davies and Anthony Taufa in The Dumb Waiter.Credit: Prudence Upton
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.
The two actors bicker and spar with exceptional timing and feel for dynamics, meanwhile, the thriller-like tension continues to build, despite the constant supply of laughs. When his work is done this well, Pinter makes most playwrights seem mere hacks.
THEATRE
THE WRONG GODS
Belvoir St Theatre, May 7. Until May 25.
★★★½
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
How do we live – and live well – in a world marked by great pain, love and change? These questions sit at the heart of theatre itself: an art form created to help us wrestle with, and collectively witness, the great task of being alive.
They’re also at the core of the work made by playwright S. Shakthidharan, whose epic Counting and Cracking first played at Sydney Town Hall in 2019 to instant acclaim, and last year played off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater.
His newest piece, The Wrong Gods – co-directed with Belvoir resident director Hannah Goodwin – is just as wide-ranging as his earlier epic, but it is far leaner in form, running a touch over 90 minutes.
Nadie Kammallaweera, Radhika Mudaliyar and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash in The Wrong Gods.
We meet Isha (Radhika Mudaliyar) and her mother Nirmala (Nadie Kammallaweera) on the banks of their life-sustaining river. Isha dreams of a world beyond the village; Nirmala can’t see how to give it to her, needing her daughter to work the land, just as generations of women in their family have done.
Then Lakshmi (Vaishnavi Suryaprakash) arrives, offering an American-backed opportunity too good to refuse. Suddenly, the wheels of progress are turning: land development, construction and technological advancement in farming. But are these new ways better than the old ones Nirmala knows in her bones? Can anything so sweeping come without strings? And who will Isha become if she abandons her land, her gods, and heads to the city?
There are moments in The Wrong Gods, shaped like a drama and directed like a fable, that are quietly moving and disarmingly powerful. On Keerthi Subramanyam’s tree-ring set – built from sustainable and recycled wood as a symbolic tether to the threatened forest – these women argue, laugh, plan and fight, carrying a universe of feeling.
The play is at its strongest when its big ideas wear human faces. Much is communicated when Isha and Nirmala reckon with each other’s hearts, and Manali Datar brings a much-needed grounding presence as Devi, a city-born ex-corporate who finds new life and community through solidarity with Nirmala’s cause.
There are moments, though, when the spell is broken – a scene or two that are more didactic than the narrative can hold, where dialogue is driven by expediency more than character, and a few performances are still settling into the rhythms of the script.
Perhaps that’s to be expected from a play that’s trying to take the measure of a world. The Wrong Gods digs deep into our collective scarring – from corruption, greed, colonisation and gentrification, of progress over people – and tries to find a message in our past for how to go on. Maybe hope lies in the act of gathering itself: to witness, to listen, to tell stories, to keep searching for what’s true as the world shifts around us.