THE DUMB WAITER

It’s become a cliché to label a charming place one hasn’t come across before as ‘one of London’s best-kept secrets’, but last week, I found a little fringe theatre, The Print Room, that deserves the label. Pumpkin lanterns carved with the words ‘poetry’ and ‘theatre’, so much more attractive than the traditional eyes, nose and teeth, light the passage to the tiny foyer where warm carrot and ginger soup and a glass of champagne (at no charge) welcomes you.

Which is just as well, for while actor-director Jamie Glover’s excellent revival of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter plumbs every last drop of humour from this chilling piece, it nevertheless brought out my companion (a Pinter virgin) in goose pimples and haunted her for days after.

In his programme note, Glover, son of Isla Blair and Julian Glover, says this is the play that made him want to go in to the theatre. As a 10-year-old, a school production dazzled him with the contrast between the ordinariness of the characters and the very real menace and the extraordinariness of the theatrical language and absurd humour.

Indeed, this brief, blackly, bleakly comic 1957 play is the perfect introduction to Pinter, particularly when staged and performed as well as it is here. It concerns two hit men, the physically well-contrasted Clive Wood as solid, sandy-haired, strong-as-an-ox Ben and Joe Armstrong’s younger, pointy, nervy Gus, scrapping hilariously about whether you should say ‘light the kettle’ or ‘put on the kettle’ in the windowless basement of a Birmingham house as they await orders about their next contract killing. The title refers both to them as they wait (like the tramps in Beckett’s Godot, whose staccato, poetic, music-hall cross-talk they echo) and to the old-fashioned serving hatch in the middle of the back wall of Andrew D Edwards’s authentically dilapidated claustrophobic design, which in the play’s best visual gag suddenly and brilliantly clanks into action to deliver evermore unlikely orders (‘scampi’ – as if!).

Like so many of his plays, the action remains locked within this one room, from which Gus occasionally pops out for a pee and/or to fail to make tea because they’ve no money for the gas. Meanwhile, the minutes pass and the tension mounts.

As ever with Pinter, it’s a play about power, both political and personal, the deterioration of the relationship between a couple, who are also evidently puppets of a higher unseen authority. In other words, it refl ects the state of many of us as well as our anxieties that we may be playthings of a whimsical God. Terrifying – but spot on.

Until 23 November at The Print Room, 34 Hereford Road, London W2: 020-7221 6036, www.theprint-room.org