![]() Both are waiting both are dumb one waits dumbly for the time to carry out an assassination the other, unknowingly, for his own execution. While the title of the play seems to refer to a small elevator built into the wall, usually used to transport food and trash from one floor in a building to another, Pinter is not referring only to the dumb waiter as a contraption, but to each one of the men as well. Their entire being is defined by their obedience to invisible, all-powerful, and quietly menacing forces. They themselves seem to determine nothing. Like cogs in a machine, subject to mysterious directives, bound together but alienated from each other, the hit men follow the orders they are given. Set in a claustrophobic basement furnished like a cheap hotel for transients or even a prison cell, it is a study not so much of the two hit men temporarily staying there as they wait for their orders, but of the character of their interaction and of the nature of their condition, and by extension, the nature of the context defining the human condition. ![]() Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter (1957) is a two character, one-act play. ![]()
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