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Harold Pinter's the Dumb Waiter Harold Pinter’s THE DUMB WAI T ER DIALOGUE 6 Edited by Michael J. Meyer Harold Pinter’s THE DUMB WAI T ER Edited by Mary F. Brewer Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Cover Design: Pier Post Cover Image: Dan Grigsby The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2556-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands Contents General Editor’s Preface vii Introduction: The Dumb Waiter -- A different kind of theater Mary F. Brewer xi A Realist-Naturalist Pinter Revisited Naoko Yagi 1 The Dumb Waiter: Realism and Metaphor Radmila Nasti 17 (Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace Basil Chiasson 31 Feeding Power: Pinter, Bakhtin, and Inverted Carnival David Pattie 55 Return of the Referent Varun Begley 71 “Disorder … in a Darkened Room:” the Juridico-Political Space of The Dumb Waiter Juliet Rufford 89 High Art or Popular Culture: Traumatic conflicts of representation and postmodernism in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter Catherine Rees 111 Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter: Negotiating the boundary between “high” and “low” culture Michael Patterson 127 vi Contents “The Ironic Con Game” Revisited: Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, a Key to Courage Penelope Prentice 143 The “Other” Within Us: the Rubin’s Vase of Class in The Dumb Waiter Jonathan Shandell 161 Anti-ritual, Critical Domestication and Representational Precision in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter Lance Norman 173 “Mixed feelings about words:” Language, politics and the ethics of inter-subjectivity in The Dumb Waiter Mary F. Brewer 189 Unpacking the Pinteresque in The Dumb Waiter and Beyond Marc E. Shaw 211 The First Last Look in the Shadows: Pinter and the Pinteresque Anne Luyat 231 Essay Abstracts 247 About the Authors 253 Index 259 General Editor’s Preface The original concept for Rodopi’s new series entitled Dialogue grew out of two very personal experiences of the general editor. In 1985, having just finished my dissertation on John Steinbeck and attained my doctoral degree, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Steinbeck biographer, Jackson J. Benson, to submit an essay for a book he was working on. I was unpublished at the time and unsure and hesitant about my writing talent, but I realized that I had nothing to lose. It was truly the “opportunity of a lifetime.” I revised and shortened a chapter of my dissertation on Steinbeck’s The Pearl and sent it off to California. Two months later, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my essay had been accepted and would appear in Duke University Press’s The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (1990). Surprisingly, my good fortune continued when several months after the book appeared, Tetsumaro Hayashi, a renowned Steinbeck scholar, asked me to serve as one of the three assistant editors of The Steinbeck Quarterly, then being published at Ball State University. Quite naïve at the time about publishing, I did not realize how fortunate I had been to have such opportunities present themselves without any struggle on my part to attain them. After finding my writing voice and editing several volumes on my own, I discovered in 2002 that despite my positive experiences, there was a real prejudice against newer “emerging” scholars when it came to inclusion in collections or acceptance in journals. As the designated editor of a Steinbeck centenary collection, I found myself roundly questioned about the essays I had chosen for inclusion in the book. Specifically, I was asked why I had not selected several prestigious names whose recognition power would have spurred the book’s success on the market. My choices of lesser known but quality essays seemed unacceptable. New voices were unwelcome; it was the tried and true that were greeted with open arms. Yet these scholars had no need for further publications and often offered few original insights into the Steinbeck canon. Sadly, the originality of the lesser-known essayists met with hostility; the doors were closed, perhaps even locked tight, against their innovative approaches. Readings that took issue with scholars whose authority viii Harold Pinter’s Dumb Waiter and expertise had long been unquestioned were rejected in favor of the tried and true. Angered, I withdrew as editor of the volume and began to think of ways to rectify what I considered a serious flaw in academe. My goal was to open discussions between experienced scholars and those who were just beginning their academic careers and had not yet broken through the publication barriers. Dialogue would be fostered rather than discouraged. Having previously served as an editor for several volumes in Rodopi’s Perspective of Modern Literature series under the general editorship of David Bevan, I sent a proposal to Fred Van der Zee advocating a new series that would be entitled Dialogue, one that would examine the controversies within classic canonical texts and would emphasize an interchange between established voices and those whose ideas had never reached the academic community because their names were unknown. Happily, the press was willing to give the concept a try and gave me a wide scope in determining not only the texts to be covered but also in deciding who would edit the individual volumes. The Dumb Waiter volume that appears here is the sixth attempt at this unique approach to criticism. It features several well- known Pinter experts and several other essayists whose reputation is not so widespread but whose keen insights skillfully inform the text. It will soon be followed by volumes on Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. It is my hope that as more new titles appear, the Dialogue series will foster not only renewed interest in the chosen works but that each volume will bring forth new ideas as well as fresh interpretations from heretofore silenced voices. In this atmosphere, a healthy interchange of criticism can develop, one that will allow even dissent and opposite viewpoints to be expressed without fear that such stances may be seen as negative or counter-productive. General Editor’s Preface ix My thanks to Rodopi and its editorial board for its support of this “radical” concept. May you, the reader, discover much to value in these new approaches to issues that have fascinated readers for decades and to books that have long stimulated our imaginations and our critical discourse Michael J. Meyer 2009 Introduction: The Dumb Waiter -- A different kind of theater Mary F. Brewer Writing in the 1960s, the critic Eric Bentley spoke of the need for a different kind of modern theater, one of “purity:” a theater characterized by “simplicity and sincerity.” Elaborating on this concept of purity, he called for plays that “replaced the equivocations of popular prejudice with consistent and responsible attitudes” (xiii), which he found to be sadly lacking in the “unreal” realism of so much 1960s theater. It is odd, therefore, that in a book of criticism spanning the stages of Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Marceau, and Martha Graham that Bentley does not address the work of Harold Pinter, for Pinter’s drama encapsulates more than most the “artistic delights” married to “a theater of statements” to which Bentley would have modern playwrights aspire: For a statement is a fine, clear, human thing, and shines by contrast in a world of pseudo- statement -- a world of slogans, doubletalk, jargon, cant. (xiv) What this volume of essays attempts is to illuminate more precisely how one of Pinter’s best known plays, The Dumb Waiter, rises above the world of pseudo-statements and achieves, through its unique blend of absurdity, farce, and surface realism, a profoundly moving statement about the modern human condition. Written in 1957, The Dumb Waiter premièred at the Hampstead Theater Club on January 21, 1960. Since then, it has enjoyed numerous professional and student revivals in the UK and across the world. In 2007, Pinter celebrated 50 years working in the theater, as actor, director, and of course, as one of the most innovative and influential British playwrights of the twentieth century. In commemoration of this milestone, Harry Burton launched a critically acclaimed 50th-anniversary production of The Dumb Waiter at xii Mary Brewer Trafalgar Studios in London (February-March 2007). While Pinter’s later writing or dramas continue to produce radical and testing material both for live performance and the screen, the Trafalgar Studios’ production was indicative of how his early work remains relevant; hence, it continues to generate substantial interest and critical debate among scholars as well as theater practitioners. The Dumb Waiter has achieved also the rare distinction for a modern play of being adapted for popular TV. In 1987, ABC television produced a star-studded adaptation of The Dumb Waiter featuring John Travolta and Tom Conti. In addition to an early BBC television version, which appeared in 1961, the play was again featured as part of the Pinter at the BBC season in 2002. That The Dumb Waiter continues to inspire creative interest is evidenced by the amount of material posted to the Web featuring productions by student and amateur dramatic groups, and by innovative responses to the play such as the animated short by Daniel Grigsby, from which the cover for this volume is taken. When awarding Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, the Academy explained that Pinter is an artist whose work "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Few individual critics have better summed up the matter at the heart of The Dumb Waiter; for an audience to gaze into Ben and Gus’ closed basement room and overhear their “everyday prattle” is to gain insight into what Penelope Prentice calls the play’s “terrifying vision of the dominant-subservient battle for power,” a battle in which societies and individuals engage as a part of daily existence.
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