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.

Nicole Da Silva, Anthony Taufa and Gareth Davies take a break from rehearsals.Credit: Steven Siewert

“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.

Ensemble Theatre’s Mark Kilmurry in rehearsals for the Pinter double-header The Dumb Waiter and The Lover. Credit: Prudence Upton

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.”

The Lover is a very different kind of story. Written in 1962 and premiered on British TV a year later, it concerns an ordinary middle-class English couple who appear to be having affairs and being very honest and matter-of-fact about it with each other. But then, we realise, each is actually role-playing the other’s extra-marital partner.

Gareth Davies and Anthony Taufa as two hapless hitmen in rehearsals for The Dumb Waiter.Credit: Prudence Upton

As with The Dumb Waiter, although it is very funny, there is a heavy sense of menace hiding in the words, stalking the action throughout. “What’s being said, but also what’s not being said,” Kilmurry says.

“And for both plays, it’s the subtext that’s as important as the actual lines that are being spoken aloud, and in between the lines is the same as Pinter pauses and silences. That’s where that sense of dread and something other happening that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

Power, who has it and how it is used, are also questions scuttling around the edge of both plays as the verbal tussles unfold. But the answers are not obvious, particularly in The Lover, in which traditional gender roles are writ large.

“Gender politics come into play,” says da Silva.

“It calls into question how men and women relate to each other and how they relate to each other now; I think it will challenge a lot of perceptions ... I feel like Sarah holds a lot of power and to be doing so in a 1963 context is remarkable.”

Gareth Davies likens the hitmen of The Dumb Waiter to a comedy double act, such as Abbott and Costello.

“It’s where one’s got a bit more power than the other, or one believes they have a bit more power than the other, but they’re probably exactly the same, or one thinks they’re smarter than the other, but they’re probably approximately the same. You can see that double act right through popular culture for decades,” he says.

But common to both plays is that sense that the characters are in a way trapped by circumstance.

“Being trapped in not just a relationship or not just a marriage, but in a world which demands, you know, being a housewife or being salary man, and it’s just for many intolerable after a while, I think, and that’s what I get from The Lover, it’s a real kind of escape they need, not just a fun game,” Davies says.

The hitmen of The Dumb Waiter are also trapped, pawns in an unknown game moved by an unknown and unseen player. At the time, it was seen as a metaphor for communist totalitarianism; now it has a new resonance.

“They’re about power ... both between the characters in the play and outside world,” Davies says.

“I think that resonates now because power seems such a brazen and acceptable thing to go after ... how far people are willing, and how brazen they are willing to be to get it.”

The Lover and The Dumb Waiter, Ensemble Theatre, May 2 to June 7. 

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