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The Dumb Waiter, Hampstead Theatre, review: like Waiting for Godot – with guns

Shane Zaza and Alec Newman in The Dumb Waiter at the Hampstead Theatre -  Alastair Muir
Shane Zaza and Alec Newman in The Dumb Waiter at the Hampstead Theatre - Alastair Muir

You can almost smell the damp rising off the stained brown walls in this 60th-anniversary production of Harold Pinter’s early absurdist thriller, rescheduled (for the familiar reasons) from March. The Dumb Waiter is one of his more accessible shorts, a mix of Beckett and Martin McDonagh in which two hitmen in the basement of an unnamed building wait for instructions for their next job, like Waiting for Godot with guns.

Danny Dyer and Martin Freeman most recently – and memorably – performed it during Jamie Lloyd’s 2019 Pinter at the Pinter season in the West End. The initially unnerving thing about Alice Hamilton’s horribly atmospheric production, however, is how little Alec Newman and Shane Zaza look like hitman. Newman’s Ben reclines on the bed reading the paper, the picture of Sunday afternoon leisure. Zaza’s younger, more wholesome-looking Gus keeps tying and retying his laces, like a slightly gormless school boy.

Yet it’s in such everyday banalities that Pinter’s two-hander, enabled by Hamilton’s furtive detailing, accretes its inscrutable violence. The sound of a lavatory that won’t properly flush jangles the nerves. An open door, through which who-knows-what might enter, gnaws at the mind. When a dumb waiter comes crashing down into the pair’s oddly prison-like cell, it does so with the force of a medieval instrument of torture.

Hamilton’s production remains tightly focused on the two men, both of whom, it becomes clear, are in the grip of a nervous breakdown. Both deftly handle Pinter’s flat vowels and staccato rhythms, but they also make the very words start to sweat.

Zaza’s jittery Gus is visibly traumatised by the last killing, a girl, and can’t leave it alone. Her body “didn’t half spread” he says, almost in wonder. Newman, rougher, quick to assert his authority, is prone to unpredictable eruptions of fury. He lays out his clothing with the taut fastidiousness of an ex-soldier with PTSD. Their response to the bizarre food orders inside the dumb waiter – braised beef, liver and onions, scampi ­– verge on the hysterical. The slapstick that ensues as they wrestle with the speaker tube and argue over eccles cakes unsettles for being so tonally jarring.

Yet the fact that you are never entirely convinced the two are heartless killers shifts the play’s emphasis. This pair may be complicit in some unknown machinery of terror, yet its not the machinery that chills us but the extent to which they are victims of it. Both men give, in the ambiguous dénouement, the authoritarian system in which the play lives a helpless human face.

Until Jan 16. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com