The Dumb Waiter

Stigespillerne says the following about The Dumb Waiter:

"Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny. And I think what I try to do in my plays is to get to this recognizable reality of the absurdity of what we do and how we behave and how we speak", Harold Pinter said.

Harold Pinter based his work in the absurdity in life. He opposed the actors' tendency to provide too much information about the background and motivation of the characters. Pinter wanted a more realistic theatre and hence he let the action in his plays be absurd, the way reality often is.

In the program for The Dumb Waiter when it was staged in London in 1960, Pinter wrote:

"The desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false; The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. The assumption that to verify what has happened and what is happening presents a few problems I take to be inaccurate.

A Character on the stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations , nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives, is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression."

Source:

www.stigespillerne.no