Program Note
Conventional plays fall in line with a realistic society, morality, psychology, and aesthetic reality. They ground us in a psyche that we are accustomed to stimulate connection to the unravelling story. Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, is not one of these plays. The Dumb Waiter is a play that exists in absurdism, in a state of menial, almost meaningless existence. Absurdism has the power and often the drive to alienate us as audience members and makes us ask what the purpose is in everyday life? What roles do we as human beings play in society, if any? What are the orders we are given to fulfill on a day to day basis? What is the purpose of how we live and how we die?
The theatre of the absurd expresses what happens when human existence no longer has meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down and man is left to ponder. As Harold Pinter himself described absurdism within his own plays, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”
In this world of ordinary disinterested things there are infinitely more questions than answers. We can uncover meaning in the obvious, and question the unknown and understood alike. By examining the futility of average life we see the pointlessness of our being in hopes to be able to understand it.
In the Dumb Waiter the characters are more gestural than forms. Although two men will soon enter the room bicker, talk, fight, live out their everyday lives, its say they are human they way we are although they represent the same nature of our humanity. This uneasiness comes from Pinter’s attitude as a playwright; he addresses his characters at the very root of their existence. It is almost as if he does away with the less essential, even personality of his characters to cut away and find the underlying flesh of their existence. When questioned in a radio interview with host Kenneth Tynan in 1960 about why his characters never seem interested in politics, or sex, or general ideas Pinter replied:
“I’m dealing with these characters at the extreme edge of their living, where they are living pretty much alone, at their hearth, their home hearth … we all, I think … may have sexual relationships or go to political meetings or discuss ideas, but when we get back to our rooms and we are faced with a bed and we are either alone or with someone else, then.. I don’t think we go on long about ideas or political allegiances.”
When we find ourselves alone in a room what is really there? Pinter rejects conventional exposition in drama because in reality we’ll never understand the human condition or what motivates ourselves let alone another human being. We’re all waiting in a dark room with infinite questions looking for impossible answers.
The theatre of the absurd expresses what happens when human existence no longer has meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down and man is left to ponder. As Harold Pinter himself described absurdism within his own plays, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”
In this world of ordinary disinterested things there are infinitely more questions than answers. We can uncover meaning in the obvious, and question the unknown and understood alike. By examining the futility of average life we see the pointlessness of our being in hopes to be able to understand it.
In the Dumb Waiter the characters are more gestural than forms. Although two men will soon enter the room bicker, talk, fight, live out their everyday lives, its say they are human they way we are although they represent the same nature of our humanity. This uneasiness comes from Pinter’s attitude as a playwright; he addresses his characters at the very root of their existence. It is almost as if he does away with the less essential, even personality of his characters to cut away and find the underlying flesh of their existence. When questioned in a radio interview with host Kenneth Tynan in 1960 about why his characters never seem interested in politics, or sex, or general ideas Pinter replied:
“I’m dealing with these characters at the extreme edge of their living, where they are living pretty much alone, at their hearth, their home hearth … we all, I think … may have sexual relationships or go to political meetings or discuss ideas, but when we get back to our rooms and we are faced with a bed and we are either alone or with someone else, then.. I don’t think we go on long about ideas or political allegiances.”
When we find ourselves alone in a room what is really there? Pinter rejects conventional exposition in drama because in reality we’ll never understand the human condition or what motivates ourselves let alone another human being. We’re all waiting in a dark room with infinite questions looking for impossible answers.