Jamie Glover may yet tread the Samuel West path whereby acting’s loss is directing’s gain, but at the moment he seems to be balancing both aspects of his career. After a clutch of regional and touring productions, he makes his London début as a director with a modest but heartfelt venture. He vouchsafes in the programme that Harold Pinter’s short piece is “the play that made me want to enter the theatre”, attracted by the then-radical blend of humour and menace. The Dumb Waiter lasts only 50 minutes or so, but it contains no less Pinter for your buck than any full-length or later-written piece (this predates even The Birthday Party, although it premièred subsequently). Pinter already knew, like Beckett, that a drama should be only as long as it needs to be. Extending this piece would merely have stretched it thinner, whereas here the human ingredients – two nervous hitmen in a dingy basement in Birmingham awaiting their next assignment – and the instruments of discomfiture – a dumb waiter via which they receive surreal food orders as if in a restaurant kitchen, and a speaking tube through which the instructions ultimately come – are maintained at high tension, like a bowstring with perfect musical pitch.
    
Glover and his duo of actors, Clive Wood and Joe Armstrong, are contending not with memories of golden-age Pinter in this case, but with the 50th-anniversary production a few years ago in which Lee Evans proved such a revelation as an actor (a reputation he is currently frittering away in the dire Barking In Essex in the West End). Armstrong here is less at sea than Evans’ version of the character of Gus: the chatter here is not explicitly that of nervousness, but simply of a bloke who chatters. If anything, Wood as Ben seems edgier at every stage. The overall effect is a more even relationship dynamic than the usual portrayal. Andrew D Edwards’ design wraps the entire Print Room space in damp, discoloured walls and metal stacking shelves, placing us in the same intimate environment as the figures onstage, and Peter Rice’s sound design works as much through its background subtlety as through the obvious moments of high drama. If the final twist seems now less shocking in its authoritarian brutality, this is only because we have now become thoroughly habituated to such a world in every respect.

Written for the Financial Times.