Gareth Davies and Nicole Da Silva in The Lover. Photo: Prudence Upton
Deliciously snarky, both in the performances and Harold Pinter’s precise dialogue, the first play in this double bill, The Lover, lays bare power dynamics in a bourgeois marriage.
Set in the 1960s, the scene is a perfectly tidy living room, presided over by a coiffed and chic Sarah (Nicole Da Silva), who as the play opens is saying an affectionate goodbye to her husband Richard (Gareth Davies), conservatively besuited and off to work. But then Richard asks, matter of factly, ‘Is your lover coming this afternoon?’ and, having been told yes, picks up his briefcase and wishes his wife a pleasant afternoon.
So begins a blackly comic, but at its climax tense, exploration of domestic boredom contrasted with sexual freedom. Pinter leads the audience to believe that there are four characters in the play: the wife, the husband, the wife’s lover and the husband’s whore. But all is not as it initially seems.
Through role plays, the tensions and inequalities in the marriage are explored and the lines between reality and fantasy blur . And this being Pinter, the language is key. The woman might have a lover, but the man does not have a mistress – he has a whore, or a ‘common or garden slut’. (Plus ça change.) And who’s home is this, anyway?
Under Mark Kilmurry’s sure direction, this production of The Lover moves at a steady pace (no long pauses as Pinter audiences may have come to expect) and keeps us engrossed with its snaky twists and turns – and there are quite a few of those. Both Davies and Da Silva are excellent in this very neat, psychological drama – and the ending may surprise. Misogyny or an exposé of men’s fear? Pinter is on record as ‘wanting his audience to complete his plays, to resolve in their own ways …irresolvable matters’. This one is no different.
The second play begins far more bleakly. For The Dumb Waiter, the stage has been transformed into a stark, grey room, redolent of a prison cell (credit due here to Simon Romanuik for both sets and costume design). Ben (Davies) and Gus (Anthony Taufa) have a job to do and are awaiting instructions. It soon becomes clear they are hitmen, but we don’t know – and neither, it seems, do they – what the job is and who is orchestrating it. The only communication from their basement to the outside world is through a dumb waiter, but the only messages they receive are to do with obscure food requests. There is an unseen authority here, and while it rattles both Ben and Gus, both are compliant.
There is also the power play between Ben and Gus. Ben repeatedly reminds him he is his superior. Pinter wrote this play in 1957, when British class structures were even more pronounced. Gus occasionally questions their subservience to the higher-ups (literally and figuratively in this play) while Ben resolutely bends to the status quo. Of these two plays, The Dumb Waiter is the more political. Pinter is showing us a hierarchical society, where to rebel or question mainstream views could have dire consequences. (And again, nearly 60 years later, that message hasn’t changed.)
Taufa’s Gus is the more humane, more ‘ordinary’ of the two men. Davies, whose own insecurities are more masked, gives us an equally interesting Ben. Kilmurry and his cast keep the atmosphere tense to the very end. Together they keep us wondering, as indeed they are wondering, what comes next. Even the title of the play is a question: who or what is the ‘dumb waiter’ here?
This is an absorbing double bill, full of dark humour and suspense; two small plays perfectly formed. Recommended.
Until 7June
Tickets $43-$90
https://www.ensemble.com.au
