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LONDON: Harold Pinter is serious. Arguably Britain's greatest living playwright, he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005 for drama that "forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." These days he spends much of his time excoriating the U.S. and British governments over the war in Iraq.
Two new London productions seek to remind audiences of the 76-year-old dramatist's under-appreciated comic side.
The more traditional — and successful — is "The Dumb Waiter," a menacing two-act play first performed in 1960.
Director Harry Burton's production, which opened Thursday at London's Trafalgar Studios, signals its comic credentials by casting Lee Evans, a rubber-limbed physical comedian well known from film and television, in one of the principal roles.
The play is set in a grotty cellar where the anxious Gus (Evans) and the stolid Ben (Jason Isaacs) read the newspaper, discuss sports, seek a cup of tea — and wait.
Though their reason for being there is not immediately clear, the sinister purpose soon becomes apparent. But as their mission is revealed, the baffled pair begin to receive orders for ever-more elaborate meals via a dumbwaiter connecting the basement to the building above.
The characters' rising confusion, anger and frustration become increasingly tense — and, yes, funny.
The play owes a debt to the eternally deferred Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" — and an even bigger one to the comic music-hall double acts of Pinter's native east London. Isaacs is the gruff straight man, Evans his rangy comic foil.
Evans, who made a West End splash in 2004 starring opposite Nathan Lane in Mel Brooks' exuberant musical "The Producers," mines a vein of fidgety anxiety not far removed from his standup persona.
It is tempered by Isaacs — a versatile actor known to millions as Lucius Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" movies — who is a model of simmering restraint as the taciturn, slow-boiling Ben.
"The Dumb Waiter" provides an early distillation of Pinter's signature themes. The mix of the naturalistic and the absurd, of grubby domesticity and suppressed violence, the terseness and the famous silences — all ripple through this compact 60-minute drama.
The dumbwaiter is a potent symbol of the unseen and seemingly irrational forces that govern human lives, and the characters' attempts to comprehend and mollify its demands are both funny and moving.
"The Dumb Waiter" — like much of Pinter's work — has dated through imitation. The play's arresting final image will not come as a surprise or a shock, as it probably did in 1960.
But the production powerfully reminds audiences of his power as a dramatist — and a humorist.
Less successful, according to the London critics, is "Pinter's People," running at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until the end of February. The show is a collection of Pinter sketches performed by a cast of comedians led by the standup-up Bill Bailey.
Most have judged it an unhappy mix. The Independent's Paul Taylor said it was "not an enjoyable evening, by any stretch of the imagination."
The Guardian's Michael Billington found the production "woeful."
"Comedy, I sometimes think, is too serious a matter to be left to comedians," he wrote.
"The Dumb Waiter" suggests we should leave it to Pinter instead.
"The Dumb Waiter" is at Trafalgar Studios in London through March 24.
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