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Play by Harold Pinter

The Dumb Waiter is a one act play by Harold Pinter written in 1957.

Two hit men, Ben and Gus, are waiting in a basement room for their assignment. As the play begins, Ben, the senior member of the team, is reading a newspaper, and Gus, the junior member, is tying his shoes. Gus asks Ben many questions as he gets ready for their job and tries to make tea. They argue over the semantics of "light the kettle" and "put on the kettle". Ben continues reading his paper for most of the time, occasionally reading excerpts of it to Gus. Ben gets increasingly animated, and Gus's questions become more pointed, at times nearly nonsensical. In the back of the room is a dumbwaiter, which delivers occasional food orders. This is mysterious and both characters seem to be puzzled why these orders keep coming; the basement is clearly not outfitted as a restaurant kitchen. At one point they send up some snack food that Gus had brought along. Ben has to explain to the people above via the dumbwaiter's "speaking tube" that there is no food. Gus leaves the room to get a drink of water in the bathroom, and the dumbwaiter's speaking tube whistles (a sign that there is a person on the other end who wishes to communicate). Ben listens carefully—we gather from his replies that their victim has arrived and is on his way to the room. Ben shouts for Gus, who is still out of the room. The door that the target is supposed to enter from flies open, Ben rounds on it with his gun, and Gus enters, stripped of his jacket, waistcoat, tie and gun. There is a long silence as the two stare at each other before the curtain falls.

The dumb waiter of the title refers to the serving hatch and food lift that delivers orders to the gunmen. It could also refer to Gus, who fails to realise that he is waiting to be the victim, or even to Ben, whose obedience to a higher authority eventually forces him to eliminate his partner.

The windowless basement is characteristic of Pinter's sets. "Pinter's rooms are stuffy, non specific cubes, whose atmosphere grows steadily more stale and more tense. At the opening curtain these rooms look naturalistic, meaning no more than the eye can contain. But, by the end of each play, they become sealed containers, virtual coffins."

Pinter's writing in The Dumb Waiter combines "the staccato rhythms of music hall cross talk and the urban thriller". Pinter stated that "between my lack of biographical data about [the characters] and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore". Another interpretation is that the play is a political drama showing how the individual is destroyed by a higher power. "Each of Harold Pinter's [first] four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual It is by his bitter dramas of dehumanisation that he implies "the importance of humanity". The religion and society, which have traditionally structured human morality, are, in Pinter's plays, the immoral agents that destroy the individual." The stories Ben picks out from his newspaper have a similar purpose. He describes an old man, wanting to cross the street, who crawls under a lorry and is run over by it (but it is not clear if the man is killed or not). Ben seems to expect the response, "What an idiot!" but Gus replies "Who advised him to do a thing like that?" which shifts responsibility and suggests the old man was a victim to be pitied. "The eventual split between Ben and Gus is foreshadowed in the very first joke By the end of the play, Pinter has trained us to see that the content of the joke exchange is meaningless: what is important is the structure, and the alliances and antagonisms it reveals." Jamie Glover wrote that "The Dumb Waiter is Pinter distilled – the very essence of a writer who tapped into our desire to seek out meaning, confront injustice and assert our individuality."

The world premiere was in Frankfurt as Der Stumme Diener in February 1959 with Rudolf H. Krieg as Ben and Werner Berndt as Gus.

At Malibu Junior High School sometime in 1979 Emilio Estevez staged this one act play with young friend and fellow classmate Jeff Lucas. Jeff Lucas played Ben and Emilio Estevez played Gus.

The first performance in London was in January 1960, as part of a double bill with Pinter's first play The Room, at the Hampstead Theatre Club, directed by James Roose Evans, with Nicholas Selby as Ben and George Tovey as Gus. The production transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in March 1960. In 1989 a revival at the Theatre Royal Haymarket was directed by Bob Carlton, with Peter Howitt as Ben and Tim Healy as Gus. In 2007 a revival at the Trafalgar Studios was directed by Harry Burton, with Jason Isaacs as Ben and Lee Evans as Gus. In 2013 a revival at The Print Room was directed by Jamie Glover, with Clive Wood as Ben and Joe Armstrong as Gus. In 2019 the play was part of a season of Pinter's one act plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre, directed by Jamie Lloyd with Danny Dyer as Ben and Martin Freeman as Gus. In 2020 a 60th anniversary revival at the Hampstead Theatre, directed by Alice Hamilton with Alec Newman as Ben and Shane Zaza as Gus, had an extended run in a COVID secure setting with the audience masked and socially distanced.

In 2004 The Oxford Playhouse presented The Dumb Waiter and Other Pieces by Harold Pinter, directed by Douglas Hodge with Jason Watkins as Ben and Toby Jones as Gus.

In 2012 a young Mark Pallister took on the role of Gus as original cast member the now Famous Lee Evans was unavailable due to his touring schedule. Mark went on to take further acting roles however it is not known if he is still pursuing an acting career today.

1959 – the play was turned down by the BBC, being considered "too obscure" for the TV audience. 1987 – Robert Altman directed a made for TV feature film version of The Dumb Waiter, starring John Travolta and Tom Conti, filmed in Canada and first televised in the United States on WABC TV on 12 May 1987, as part of Altman's two part series entitled Basements; part one is Pinter's first play The Room.

In Bruges (2008) is a black comedy, crime thriller directed and written by Martin McDonagh which also features two hitmen waiting in confinement for instructions from their mob boss after they accidentally killed a young boy during their last assassination. Neither of them understand why they have been sent to Bruges, since they could easily be kept hidden in the UK — the older man, Ken, who has a close relationship with the boss, speculates that they might be here not just to hide from the police but also to kill another person. Ken is calm and enjoys the opportunity to do some sightseeing in Bruges while waiting for their orders, while the younger man, Ray, is emotionally volatile, swinging between boredom and severe guilt at shooting the young boy. While the two men await their orders they argue and one of them bemoans their circumstances. Eventually the boss calls, asks Ken to send Ray out of the room, and then informs him that the trip to Bruges was intended to be a farewell gift for Ray, who he must now assassinate as justice for killing the young boy.