The Dumb Waiter
HAROLD PINTER
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
The Silence and Violence of Language
Pinter's work is heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, who used silence-filled pauses for a revolutionary theatrical effect. Pinter has spoken of speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence, and these aims are often evident in the dialogue of Gus and Ben. Ben's most prominent response to Gus's constant questions about the nature of their jobs is silence. Lurking underneath this silence is always the threat of violence, the anticipation of something deathly—the play ends as Ben trains his gun on Gus in silence.
Gus's questions and lamentations are also deflected, delayed, or interrupted. Ben frequently changes the conversation and never replies with any emotional depth to Gus's more probing questions. In the same way, they both avoid discussing with any profundity the newspaper articles about death, skipping past them to more trivial matters, such as the malfunctioning toilet. Ben sometimes delays his response until they are interrupted—by the sound of an inanimate object, such as the toilet (which flushes on a delay) and the dumb waiter.
The language itself is also tinged with violence, especially when the topic is something seemingly trivial. The men's argument over the phrase "Light the kettle" is filled with Ben's barbs that intimidate and shame Gus. Moreover, when Ben screams "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!" and chokes Gus, one gets the feeling that his words are intertwined with the act of physical violence.
In a sense, the looming presence of Wilson is the most dominating silence in the play. Assuming Wilson is the one sending the men messages through the dumb waiter and the speaking tube (and Gus does say at one point that sometimes Wilson only sends messages), then the audience never gets a chance to hear him, but only hears him through a secondary mouthpiece as the men read or repeat his orders. His mysteriousness is one of the more sinister components of the play, for Wilson seems to be everywhere through his multi- tiered organization. He performs an off-stage role similar to that of Godot in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but whereas Godot symbolizes a neutral god-like figure for whom the characters wait, Wilson is a malevolent god whom the characters wait for in violent silence.
Anxiety Over Social Class
Gus and Ben are both lower-class criminals, and most productions of the play emphasize their social status with appropriate dialects and accents. Some productions may even opt to give Ben a slightly higher-ranking accent, as he is more concerned with his standing. He repeatedly admonishes Gus for his "slack" appearance and habits, urging him to make himself more presentable, but Ben also seems more resigned to his lowly criminal life; he considers them fortunate for having jobs. His profound shame over his class emerges in interactions with those upstairs via the dumb waiter, and much of this shame is tied to language. The food orders from the dumb waiter are for increasingly exotic foods with unfamiliar names, and Ben pretends to know how to make them only to a point. When they decide to send up their cache of food, even Gus feels he has to impress those upstairs by announcing the brand names of their pedestrian foodstuffs. Ben also happily reports that the man upstairs, presumably of higher social standing, uses the same debated phrase—"Light the kettle"—as he does, and he warns Gus to observe decorum when talking to the upstairs, as he demonstrates with his formal apology. Ben is far more reverent of Wilson than the inquiring Gus, and his deference is attributed less to feelings of respect than to an overriding inferiority complex; Wilson is their leader for a reason, and he must obey him at all costs, even if it means betraying his friend. In this light, The Dumb Waiter can be read as an anti-corporate update of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, an allegory of in- fighting and what corporate workers will do to please their superiors.
Motifs
Repetition
At the play's start and end, Ben expresses outrage at an article in the newspaper while Gus sympathizes. Similar repetitions mark the action throughout the play. Early on, Gus bemoans the dull sleep-and-work routine of his life, and various repetitive actions—from Gus's tendency to run out matches to his recurring trips to the bathroom—emerge as the basis of this cyclical fatigue. Language, however, is where Pinter's use of repetition points to violence and the nearness of death. Gus almost always has to repeat and rephrase his important questions to Ben, questions that touch upon darker issues Ben does not wish to reveal. Ben's mechanical instructions to Gus on how to execute their murder are repeated by Gus with similar detachment, and when Ben echoes through the speaking tube his own mission to kill Gus, it likewise echoes the previous interaction with Gus. Pinter has compared echoes to silence, and if one views the silences in his plays as indications of violence, then linguistic echoes and repetitive actions suggest violence as well.
Symbols
The dumb waiter
The dumb waiter serves as a symbol for the broken, one-sided communication between Gus and Ben. If messages are to be sent via the dumb waiter, then only one person at a time can send them, and one cannot simultaneously speak and listen through the dumb waiter's speaking tube. Correspondingly, Gus and Ben never have a fully open dialogue—minimized even more by Ben's knowledge of his impending betrayal of Gus—and whenever Gus tries to bring up something emotional, Ben refuses to speak with him. This disconnection is the essence of their relationship. They do not speak with, but to each other. They are like the dumb waiter—mute carriers of information, not sharers of it. Moreover, Ben, especially, is manipulated by Wilson in the same way that the dumb waiter is controlled by its system of pulleys.
The Dumb Waiter
HAROLD PINTER
Context
Harold Pinter is one of the most acclaimed contemporary British playwrights, noted particularly for his early body of work. He was born in the working-class neighborhood of East London's Hackney (an ironic name for such an original writer) in 1930, the son of a Jewish tailor. He evacuated to Cornwall, England, at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and returned to London when he was 14. He began acting in plays at his grammar school, and later received a grant to study at London's prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He left the school after two years, and spent most of the 1950s writing his published poetry (under the name Harold Pinter) and acting in small theater productions (often under the pseudonym David Baron). In 1957, he wrote his first play in four days, The Room, a sign of the prolific output to come. His first produced play—The Birthday Partycame a year later. The reception was unfavorable—it closed within a week—but Pinter's next full-length play, The Caretaker (1960), won more accolades.
The Dumb Waiter, also staged in 1960, helped cement Pinter's status as a major theatrical figure. He frequently directed, and sometimes acted in, his growing body of work in the 1960s and 1970s, while disseminating his work into radio, television, and film. After 1978's Betrayal, Pinter did not write another full-length play until 1994, but he continued writing shorter plays and adapting the work of others for the stage and screen. A conscientious objector of war when he was eighteen (for which he was fined by the Royal Academy), Pinter was motivated to be more political—both in his works and in his public life. He was particularly distressed by the dictatorial coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. He has since become an outspoken advocate of human rights, and has criticized the Gulf War bombings and other military actions. His actions are not without controversy or contradiction—he attacked the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and in 2001 joined The International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president arrested by the United Nations for crimes against humanity.
Pinter's plays generally take place in a single, prison-like room. His works, which blend comedy and drama, often focus on jealousy, betrayal, and sexual politics, but it is his dialogue—and the lack of dialogue—for which he is known. Pinter's language, usually lower-class vernacular, has been described as poetic. His compressed, rhythmic lines rely heavily on subtext and hint at darker meanings. Just as important, however, are the silences in his plays. Pinter has spoken much on the subject, and has categorized speech as that which attempts to cover the nakedness of silence. His most obvious forbear is Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who took silences to a new level, and other playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd (a French dramatic movement in the 1950s), but whereas Beckett's silences hint at alienation, boredom, and the slow approach to death, Pinter's are ominous and violent. The true natures and motivations of his characters emerge in their silences.
Despite Pinter's relative decrease in creative output, academic attention on Pinter remains as heavy as ever. The Harold Pinter Society was founded in 1991. It publishes The Pinter Review
Quotations Explained
1. "He might not come. He might just send a message. He doesn't always come."
Gus says this in Part three in reference to Wilson, for whom Ben says they must wait. Wilson is similar to the god-like Godot in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, who also keeps two characters in suspense as they wait for his arrival. Wilson's power is greatly derived from his very absence, similar to the way silence functions in the work in terms of the absence of language. Wilson is a mystery to both of them, and Gus, particularly, feels uncomfortable around him. The fact that Wilson sometimes sends messages indicates that the later messages through the dumb waiter and the speaking tube may be from him, or at least through one of his henchmen.
2. "،Kyou come into a place when it's still dark, you come into a room you've never seen before, you sleep all day, you do your job, and then you go away in the night again."
Gus laments the boring repetition of life in Part 1. For him, life is a dead-end of routine. He recognizes that he and Ben will never escape from their lower-class roles, yet he cannot help but be a creature of habit،Xhe constantly goes to the bathroom, and he always needs to replenish his dwindling supply of matches. Ben, on the other hand, thinks they are "fortunate" to have their jobs, which only requires them to work once a week (though they have to be ready at all times). He embraces routine and likes nothing better than to read the newspaper and scoff at the same outrageous stories each day (an action that opens and closes the play). To break up his routine, he diverts himself with hobbies, which he urges Gus to take up, but these are only temporary methods to distract himself from his static position in life.
3. "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!"
Ben screams this as he chokes Gus in Part 2. It is the culmination of their debate over the phrase "Light the kettle." More important than the actual debate is the way Ben's language gradually becomes more menacing as he insults and intimidates Gus, challenging him to remember when he last saw his mother and calling attention to his own seniority. The act of choking physically cuts off Gus's ability to speak, making Ben doubly powerful, as his voice grows in power and Gus's diminishes. Ben may also harbor some resentment about Gus's lower- class phrase, and perhaps his hostility springs forth from this. Ben later expresses delight when the more sophisticated man upstairs uses the phrase, "Light the kettle," just as he does.
4. "Do you know what it takes to make an Ormitha Macarounda?"
Ben says this in Part three during the dumb waiter sequence, when the men receive several orders for increasingly fancy food from upstairs. Ashamed of his own poverty and his lack of refinement, Ben pretends he knows how to make the foreign dish to save face in front of Gus, even though he later concedes ignorance for even the simple preparation of bean sprouts. Gus, too, feels he has to prove somewhat his sophistication for the upstairs people, announcing the brand names of the working-class food they send up. In both cases, language is tied to class, and most productions of the play augment the characters' working- class dialect with appropriate accents, such as Cockney, which a British audience would identify as lower class.
5. "BEN: If there's a knock on the door you don't answer it. GUS: If there's a knock on the door I don't answer it."
This exchange occurs near the end of the play, in Part four. Ben states a series of instructions to Gus (who repeats each line) as to how they will carry out their job, which ends with their cornering the target with their guns, be it a male or female victim. Pinter directs the actors playing Ben and Gus to deliver their lines with a mechanical detachment, and the effect is that the ghastly deed of murder becomes drained of human emotion and sympathy. Gus is merely an echo, and the echo is much like silence, reinforcing Gus's status as a human "dumb waiter," manipulated and without any voice of his own. In the directions, Ben also has a lapse when he forgets to tell Gus to have his gun ready. Gus reminds him of this and he corrects himself, but it is a clue that Ben, or Wilson, intends the instructions to mislead Gus. Or it shows that Ben can also make mistakes. Although he wins this time, next time when he has a lapse he might be the victim: Wilson or the upstairs people will get him.
Back to Top
________________________________________
Harold Pinter: The Dumb Waiter
Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/dumbwaiter/
Themes
The Silence and Violence of Language
Pinter's work is heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, who used silence-filled pauses for a revolutionary theatrical effect. Pinter has spoken of speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence, and these aims are often evident in the dialogue of Gus and Ben. Ben's most prominent response to Gus's constant questions about the nature of their jobs is silence. Lurking underneath this silence is always the threat of violence, the anticipation of something deathly،Xthe play ends as Ben trains his gun on Gus in silence.
Gus's questions and lamentations are also deflected, delayed, or interrupted. Ben frequently changes the conversation and never replies with any emotional depth to Gus's more probing questions. In the same way, they both avoid discussing with any profundity the newspaper articles about death, skipping past them to more trivial matters, such as the malfunctioning toilet. Ben sometimes delays his response until they are interrupted،Xby the sound of an inanimate object, such as the toilet (which flushes on a delay) and the dumb waiter.
The language itself is also tinged with violence, especially when the topic is something seemingly trivial. The men's argument over the phrase "Light the kettle" is filled with Ben's barbs that intimidate and shame Gus. Moreover, when Ben screams "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!" and chokes Gus, one gets the feeling that his words are intertwined with the act of physical violence.
In a sense, the looming presence of Wilson is the most dominating silence in the play. Assuming Wilson is the one sending the men messages through the dumb waiter and the speaking tube (and Gus does say at one point that sometimes Wilson only sends messages), then the audience never gets a chance to hear him, but only hears him through a secondary mouthpiece as the men read or repeat his orders. His mysteriousness is one of the more sinister components of the play, for Wilson seems to be everywhere through his multi- tiered organization. He performs an off-stage role similar to that of Godot in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but whereas Godot symbolizes a neutral god-like figure for whom the characters wait, Wilson is a malevolent god whom the characters wait for in violent silence.
Anxiety Over Social Class
Gus and Ben are both lower-class criminals, and most productions of the play emphasize their social status with appropriate dialects and accents. Some productions may even opt to give Ben a slightly higher-ranking accent, as he is more concerned with his standing. He repeatedly admonishes Gus for his "slack" appearance and habits, urging him to make himself more presentable, but Ben also seems more resigned to his lowly criminal life; he considers them fortunate for having jobs. His profound shame over his class emerges in interactions with those upstairs via the dumb waiter, and much of this shame is tied to language. The food orders from the dumb waiter are for increasingly exotic foods with unfamiliar names, and Ben pretends to know how to make them only to a point. When they decide to send up their cache of food, even Gus feels he has to impress those upstairs by announcing the brand names of their pedestrian foodstuffs. Ben also happily reports that the man upstairs, presumably of higher social standing, uses the same debated phrase،X"Light the kettle"،Xas he does, and he warns Gus to observe decorum when talking to the upstairs, as he demonstrates with his formal apology. Ben is far more reverent of Wilson than the inquiring Gus, and his deference is attributed less to feelings of respect than to an overriding inferiority complex; Wilson is their leader for a reason, and he must obey him at all costs, even if it means betraying his friend. In this light, The Dumb Waiter can be read as an anti-corporate update of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, an allegory of in-fighting and what corporate workers will do to please their superiors.
Back to Top
________________________________________
Motifs
Repetition - At the play's start and end, Ben expresses outrage at an article in the newspaper while Gus sympathizes. Similar repetitions mark the action throughout the play. Early on, Gus bemoans the dull sleep-and-work routine of his life, and various repetitive actions،Xfrom Gus's tendency to run out matches to his recurring trips to the bathroom،Xemerge as the basis of this cyclical fatigue. Language, however, is where Pinter's use of repetition points to violence and the nearness of death. Gus almost always has to repeat and rephrase his important questions to Ben, questions that touch upon darker issues Ben does not wish to reveal. Ben's mechanical instructions to Gus on how to execute their murder are repeated by Gus with similar detachment, and when Ben echoes through the speaking tube his own mission to kill Gus, it likewise echoes the previous interaction with Gus. Pinter has compared echoes to silence, and if one views the silences in his plays as indications of violence, then linguistic echoes and repetitive actions suggest violence as well.
Back to Top
________________________________________
Symbols
The dumb waiter ،V 1) a small elevator used to convey food or other goods from one floor to another. 2) ،§dumb،¨ waiter: the one who serves and waits on others is supposed to be ،§dumb،¨،Xnot to express his own opinions but just to fulfill the master،¦s command and order.
The dumb waiter serves as a symbol for the broken, one-sided communication between Gus and Ben. If messages are to be sent via the dumb waiter, then only one person at a time can send them, and one cannot simultaneously speak and listen through the dumb waiter's speaking tube. Correspondingly, Gus and Ben never have a fully open dialogue،Xminimized even more by Ben's knowledge of his impending betrayal of Gus،Xand whenever Gus tries to bring up something emotional, Ben refuses to speak with him. This disconnection is the essence of their relationship. They do not speak with, but to each other. They are like the dumb waiter،Xmute carriers of information, not sharers of it. Moreover, Ben, especially, is manipulated by Wilson or the ،§authority،¨ upstairs in the same way that the dumb waiter is controlled by its system of pulleys.
http://www.sparknotes.com/
HAROLD PINTER
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
The Silence and Violence of Language
Pinter's work is heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, who used silence-filled pauses for a revolutionary theatrical effect. Pinter has spoken of speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence, and these aims are often evident in the dialogue of Gus and Ben. Ben's most prominent response to Gus's constant questions about the nature of their jobs is silence. Lurking underneath this silence is always the threat of violence, the anticipation of something deathly—the play ends as Ben trains his gun on Gus in silence.
Gus's questions and lamentations are also deflected, delayed, or interrupted. Ben frequently changes the conversation and never replies with any emotional depth to Gus's more probing questions. In the same way, they both avoid discussing with any profundity the newspaper articles about death, skipping past them to more trivial matters, such as the malfunctioning toilet. Ben sometimes delays his response until they are interrupted—by the sound of an inanimate object, such as the toilet (which flushes on a delay) and the dumb waiter.
The language itself is also tinged with violence, especially when the topic is something seemingly trivial. The men's argument over the phrase "Light the kettle" is filled with Ben's barbs that intimidate and shame Gus. Moreover, when Ben screams "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!" and chokes Gus, one gets the feeling that his words are intertwined with the act of physical violence.
In a sense, the looming presence of Wilson is the most dominating silence in the play. Assuming Wilson is the one sending the men messages through the dumb waiter and the speaking tube (and Gus does say at one point that sometimes Wilson only sends messages), then the audience never gets a chance to hear him, but only hears him through a secondary mouthpiece as the men read or repeat his orders. His mysteriousness is one of the more sinister components of the play, for Wilson seems to be everywhere through his multi- tiered organization. He performs an off-stage role similar to that of Godot in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but whereas Godot symbolizes a neutral god-like figure for whom the characters wait, Wilson is a malevolent god whom the characters wait for in violent silence.
Anxiety Over Social Class
Gus and Ben are both lower-class criminals, and most productions of the play emphasize their social status with appropriate dialects and accents. Some productions may even opt to give Ben a slightly higher-ranking accent, as he is more concerned with his standing. He repeatedly admonishes Gus for his "slack" appearance and habits, urging him to make himself more presentable, but Ben also seems more resigned to his lowly criminal life; he considers them fortunate for having jobs. His profound shame over his class emerges in interactions with those upstairs via the dumb waiter, and much of this shame is tied to language. The food orders from the dumb waiter are for increasingly exotic foods with unfamiliar names, and Ben pretends to know how to make them only to a point. When they decide to send up their cache of food, even Gus feels he has to impress those upstairs by announcing the brand names of their pedestrian foodstuffs. Ben also happily reports that the man upstairs, presumably of higher social standing, uses the same debated phrase—"Light the kettle"—as he does, and he warns Gus to observe decorum when talking to the upstairs, as he demonstrates with his formal apology. Ben is far more reverent of Wilson than the inquiring Gus, and his deference is attributed less to feelings of respect than to an overriding inferiority complex; Wilson is their leader for a reason, and he must obey him at all costs, even if it means betraying his friend. In this light, The Dumb Waiter can be read as an anti-corporate update of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, an allegory of in- fighting and what corporate workers will do to please their superiors.
Motifs
Repetition
At the play's start and end, Ben expresses outrage at an article in the newspaper while Gus sympathizes. Similar repetitions mark the action throughout the play. Early on, Gus bemoans the dull sleep-and-work routine of his life, and various repetitive actions—from Gus's tendency to run out matches to his recurring trips to the bathroom—emerge as the basis of this cyclical fatigue. Language, however, is where Pinter's use of repetition points to violence and the nearness of death. Gus almost always has to repeat and rephrase his important questions to Ben, questions that touch upon darker issues Ben does not wish to reveal. Ben's mechanical instructions to Gus on how to execute their murder are repeated by Gus with similar detachment, and when Ben echoes through the speaking tube his own mission to kill Gus, it likewise echoes the previous interaction with Gus. Pinter has compared echoes to silence, and if one views the silences in his plays as indications of violence, then linguistic echoes and repetitive actions suggest violence as well.
Symbols
The dumb waiter
The dumb waiter serves as a symbol for the broken, one-sided communication between Gus and Ben. If messages are to be sent via the dumb waiter, then only one person at a time can send them, and one cannot simultaneously speak and listen through the dumb waiter's speaking tube. Correspondingly, Gus and Ben never have a fully open dialogue—minimized even more by Ben's knowledge of his impending betrayal of Gus—and whenever Gus tries to bring up something emotional, Ben refuses to speak with him. This disconnection is the essence of their relationship. They do not speak with, but to each other. They are like the dumb waiter—mute carriers of information, not sharers of it. Moreover, Ben, especially, is manipulated by Wilson in the same way that the dumb waiter is controlled by its system of pulleys.
The Dumb Waiter
HAROLD PINTER
Context
Harold Pinter is one of the most acclaimed contemporary British playwrights, noted particularly for his early body of work. He was born in the working-class neighborhood of East London's Hackney (an ironic name for such an original writer) in 1930, the son of a Jewish tailor. He evacuated to Cornwall, England, at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and returned to London when he was 14. He began acting in plays at his grammar school, and later received a grant to study at London's prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He left the school after two years, and spent most of the 1950s writing his published poetry (under the name Harold Pinter) and acting in small theater productions (often under the pseudonym David Baron). In 1957, he wrote his first play in four days, The Room, a sign of the prolific output to come. His first produced play—The Birthday Partycame a year later. The reception was unfavorable—it closed within a week—but Pinter's next full-length play, The Caretaker (1960), won more accolades.
The Dumb Waiter, also staged in 1960, helped cement Pinter's status as a major theatrical figure. He frequently directed, and sometimes acted in, his growing body of work in the 1960s and 1970s, while disseminating his work into radio, television, and film. After 1978's Betrayal, Pinter did not write another full-length play until 1994, but he continued writing shorter plays and adapting the work of others for the stage and screen. A conscientious objector of war when he was eighteen (for which he was fined by the Royal Academy), Pinter was motivated to be more political—both in his works and in his public life. He was particularly distressed by the dictatorial coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. He has since become an outspoken advocate of human rights, and has criticized the Gulf War bombings and other military actions. His actions are not without controversy or contradiction—he attacked the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and in 2001 joined The International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president arrested by the United Nations for crimes against humanity.
Pinter's plays generally take place in a single, prison-like room. His works, which blend comedy and drama, often focus on jealousy, betrayal, and sexual politics, but it is his dialogue—and the lack of dialogue—for which he is known. Pinter's language, usually lower-class vernacular, has been described as poetic. His compressed, rhythmic lines rely heavily on subtext and hint at darker meanings. Just as important, however, are the silences in his plays. Pinter has spoken much on the subject, and has categorized speech as that which attempts to cover the nakedness of silence. His most obvious forbear is Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who took silences to a new level, and other playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd (a French dramatic movement in the 1950s), but whereas Beckett's silences hint at alienation, boredom, and the slow approach to death, Pinter's are ominous and violent. The true natures and motivations of his characters emerge in their silences.
Despite Pinter's relative decrease in creative output, academic attention on Pinter remains as heavy as ever. The Harold Pinter Society was founded in 1991. It publishes The Pinter Review
Quotations Explained
1. "He might not come. He might just send a message. He doesn't always come."
Gus says this in Part three in reference to Wilson, for whom Ben says they must wait. Wilson is similar to the god-like Godot in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, who also keeps two characters in suspense as they wait for his arrival. Wilson's power is greatly derived from his very absence, similar to the way silence functions in the work in terms of the absence of language. Wilson is a mystery to both of them, and Gus, particularly, feels uncomfortable around him. The fact that Wilson sometimes sends messages indicates that the later messages through the dumb waiter and the speaking tube may be from him, or at least through one of his henchmen.
2. "،Kyou come into a place when it's still dark, you come into a room you've never seen before, you sleep all day, you do your job, and then you go away in the night again."
Gus laments the boring repetition of life in Part 1. For him, life is a dead-end of routine. He recognizes that he and Ben will never escape from their lower-class roles, yet he cannot help but be a creature of habit،Xhe constantly goes to the bathroom, and he always needs to replenish his dwindling supply of matches. Ben, on the other hand, thinks they are "fortunate" to have their jobs, which only requires them to work once a week (though they have to be ready at all times). He embraces routine and likes nothing better than to read the newspaper and scoff at the same outrageous stories each day (an action that opens and closes the play). To break up his routine, he diverts himself with hobbies, which he urges Gus to take up, but these are only temporary methods to distract himself from his static position in life.
3. "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!"
Ben screams this as he chokes Gus in Part 2. It is the culmination of their debate over the phrase "Light the kettle." More important than the actual debate is the way Ben's language gradually becomes more menacing as he insults and intimidates Gus, challenging him to remember when he last saw his mother and calling attention to his own seniority. The act of choking physically cuts off Gus's ability to speak, making Ben doubly powerful, as his voice grows in power and Gus's diminishes. Ben may also harbor some resentment about Gus's lower- class phrase, and perhaps his hostility springs forth from this. Ben later expresses delight when the more sophisticated man upstairs uses the phrase, "Light the kettle," just as he does.
4. "Do you know what it takes to make an Ormitha Macarounda?"
Ben says this in Part three during the dumb waiter sequence, when the men receive several orders for increasingly fancy food from upstairs. Ashamed of his own poverty and his lack of refinement, Ben pretends he knows how to make the foreign dish to save face in front of Gus, even though he later concedes ignorance for even the simple preparation of bean sprouts. Gus, too, feels he has to prove somewhat his sophistication for the upstairs people, announcing the brand names of the working-class food they send up. In both cases, language is tied to class, and most productions of the play augment the characters' working- class dialect with appropriate accents, such as Cockney, which a British audience would identify as lower class.
5. "BEN: If there's a knock on the door you don't answer it. GUS: If there's a knock on the door I don't answer it."
This exchange occurs near the end of the play, in Part four. Ben states a series of instructions to Gus (who repeats each line) as to how they will carry out their job, which ends with their cornering the target with their guns, be it a male or female victim. Pinter directs the actors playing Ben and Gus to deliver their lines with a mechanical detachment, and the effect is that the ghastly deed of murder becomes drained of human emotion and sympathy. Gus is merely an echo, and the echo is much like silence, reinforcing Gus's status as a human "dumb waiter," manipulated and without any voice of his own. In the directions, Ben also has a lapse when he forgets to tell Gus to have his gun ready. Gus reminds him of this and he corrects himself, but it is a clue that Ben, or Wilson, intends the instructions to mislead Gus. Or it shows that Ben can also make mistakes. Although he wins this time, next time when he has a lapse he might be the victim: Wilson or the upstairs people will get him.
Back to Top
________________________________________
Harold Pinter: The Dumb Waiter
Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/dumbwaiter/
Themes
The Silence and Violence of Language
Pinter's work is heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, who used silence-filled pauses for a revolutionary theatrical effect. Pinter has spoken of speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence, and these aims are often evident in the dialogue of Gus and Ben. Ben's most prominent response to Gus's constant questions about the nature of their jobs is silence. Lurking underneath this silence is always the threat of violence, the anticipation of something deathly،Xthe play ends as Ben trains his gun on Gus in silence.
Gus's questions and lamentations are also deflected, delayed, or interrupted. Ben frequently changes the conversation and never replies with any emotional depth to Gus's more probing questions. In the same way, they both avoid discussing with any profundity the newspaper articles about death, skipping past them to more trivial matters, such as the malfunctioning toilet. Ben sometimes delays his response until they are interrupted،Xby the sound of an inanimate object, such as the toilet (which flushes on a delay) and the dumb waiter.
The language itself is also tinged with violence, especially when the topic is something seemingly trivial. The men's argument over the phrase "Light the kettle" is filled with Ben's barbs that intimidate and shame Gus. Moreover, when Ben screams "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!" and chokes Gus, one gets the feeling that his words are intertwined with the act of physical violence.
In a sense, the looming presence of Wilson is the most dominating silence in the play. Assuming Wilson is the one sending the men messages through the dumb waiter and the speaking tube (and Gus does say at one point that sometimes Wilson only sends messages), then the audience never gets a chance to hear him, but only hears him through a secondary mouthpiece as the men read or repeat his orders. His mysteriousness is one of the more sinister components of the play, for Wilson seems to be everywhere through his multi- tiered organization. He performs an off-stage role similar to that of Godot in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but whereas Godot symbolizes a neutral god-like figure for whom the characters wait, Wilson is a malevolent god whom the characters wait for in violent silence.
Anxiety Over Social Class
Gus and Ben are both lower-class criminals, and most productions of the play emphasize their social status with appropriate dialects and accents. Some productions may even opt to give Ben a slightly higher-ranking accent, as he is more concerned with his standing. He repeatedly admonishes Gus for his "slack" appearance and habits, urging him to make himself more presentable, but Ben also seems more resigned to his lowly criminal life; he considers them fortunate for having jobs. His profound shame over his class emerges in interactions with those upstairs via the dumb waiter, and much of this shame is tied to language. The food orders from the dumb waiter are for increasingly exotic foods with unfamiliar names, and Ben pretends to know how to make them only to a point. When they decide to send up their cache of food, even Gus feels he has to impress those upstairs by announcing the brand names of their pedestrian foodstuffs. Ben also happily reports that the man upstairs, presumably of higher social standing, uses the same debated phrase،X"Light the kettle"،Xas he does, and he warns Gus to observe decorum when talking to the upstairs, as he demonstrates with his formal apology. Ben is far more reverent of Wilson than the inquiring Gus, and his deference is attributed less to feelings of respect than to an overriding inferiority complex; Wilson is their leader for a reason, and he must obey him at all costs, even if it means betraying his friend. In this light, The Dumb Waiter can be read as an anti-corporate update of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, an allegory of in-fighting and what corporate workers will do to please their superiors.
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Motifs
Repetition - At the play's start and end, Ben expresses outrage at an article in the newspaper while Gus sympathizes. Similar repetitions mark the action throughout the play. Early on, Gus bemoans the dull sleep-and-work routine of his life, and various repetitive actions،Xfrom Gus's tendency to run out matches to his recurring trips to the bathroom،Xemerge as the basis of this cyclical fatigue. Language, however, is where Pinter's use of repetition points to violence and the nearness of death. Gus almost always has to repeat and rephrase his important questions to Ben, questions that touch upon darker issues Ben does not wish to reveal. Ben's mechanical instructions to Gus on how to execute their murder are repeated by Gus with similar detachment, and when Ben echoes through the speaking tube his own mission to kill Gus, it likewise echoes the previous interaction with Gus. Pinter has compared echoes to silence, and if one views the silences in his plays as indications of violence, then linguistic echoes and repetitive actions suggest violence as well.
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Symbols
The dumb waiter ،V 1) a small elevator used to convey food or other goods from one floor to another. 2) ،§dumb،¨ waiter: the one who serves and waits on others is supposed to be ،§dumb،¨،Xnot to express his own opinions but just to fulfill the master،¦s command and order.
The dumb waiter serves as a symbol for the broken, one-sided communication between Gus and Ben. If messages are to be sent via the dumb waiter, then only one person at a time can send them, and one cannot simultaneously speak and listen through the dumb waiter's speaking tube. Correspondingly, Gus and Ben never have a fully open dialogue،Xminimized even more by Ben's knowledge of his impending betrayal of Gus،Xand whenever Gus tries to bring up something emotional, Ben refuses to speak with him. This disconnection is the essence of their relationship. They do not speak with, but to each other. They are like the dumb waiter،Xmute carriers of information, not sharers of it. Moreover, Ben, especially, is manipulated by Wilson or the ،§authority،¨ upstairs in the same way that the dumb waiter is controlled by its system of pulleys.
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