Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter Endures a questionable sex change

Photo: Dangerous Minds

If the people at Ottawa’s Third Wall Theatre and 100 Watt Productions are to believed, hit men in the England of the 1950s were not confined to the male gender.

Such seems to be the rationale for the sex change which occurs in the production of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, which arrived last week at the Avalon Studio on Bank Street.

Instead of Ben and Gus, the two hit men waiting in the cellar of a Birmingham house to carry out a contract killing, we have Benita (Kristina Watt) and Augusta (Mary Ellis). But really, the production’s bold conceit of casting two women ultimately seems rather pointless — apart from giving two accomplished performers the chance to show off their acting chops.

Are these performances watchable? In general, yes. Are their characters believable? Not really. When they do capture the rhythms and cadences of Pinter’s dialogue — particularly those memorable music-hall-style exchanges, seething with quiet unease, on such seemingly mundane matters as boiling a kettle — these actresses can be mordantly funny. Such moments also remind us of some of the playwright’s major concerns — the dynamics of power-jockeying in personal relationships, as well as the break-down in communications between human beings. But there are also passages of a more problematic sensibility, suggesting that — no matter how hard they try — Watt and Ellis don’t belong in these roles. And the play itself seems so defined by place and time that it keeps working against them. However, the production flounders in other areas as well.

The Avalon’s 60-seat performing space helps deliver the claustrophobia that the text demands. And designer Graham Price certainly immerses us in seediness. Nothing would surprise us about this dank, depressing basement room where — one suspects — even the bed sheets are grubby. And when that mysterious dumb waiter comes rumbling down, delivering ever more bizarre food orders that these two hapless gangsters obviously can’t fill, a sense of dislocation intensifies. Benita and Augusta are clearly thrown by these demands, and their pathetically funny efforts to respond should heighten the tension already existing between them.

But for all the dark delights afforded by, say, a fragment of comic bickering about Eccles cakes, that tension is not sustained. In this production, The Dumb Waiter repeatedly has trouble asserting its credentials as a comedy of menace.

We’re also perhaps too conscious of two fine actresses “acting.” "It’s asking too much of us to believe in Kirsten Watt when the script carries her into "bloke" talk about woodworking and model boats. But she still fares the best, bringing a watchful, feline intensity to the character of Benita, an outwardly controlled, fact-obsessed assassin who is nonetheless living on her nerves. However, Mary Ellis often seems out of synch. Yes, her Augusta elicits some laughs when she complains about the smelly bedding or the unreliability of the off-stage lavatory, and she certainly lets us know about Augusta’s anxieties. But under Todd Duckworth’s haphazard direction, her overdone characterization lacks discipline and borders on buffoonery, Yes, there are echoes of the music hall here. Yes, it is possible to see elements of Lou Costello or Oliver Hardy in the character of Gus or, rather, Augusta. But Ellis seems self-indulgent here, more intent on doing her own personal turn without much reference to the script.

The very worst moments come at the beginning with an unfunny and seemingly interminable bit of pantomime involving a floundering Augusta at war with a pair of uncomfortable boots. There are echoes here of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot — which makes one wonder whether Duckworth has been too much influenced by Pinter biographer Michael Billington’s suggestion that The Dumb Waiter can be viewed as “a kind of Godot in Birmingham” with “two men passing the time in a universe without meaning or purpose.” Whatever the intent, the boot sequence does not work and instead stops the play in its tracks before it has scarcely begun.

Unfortunately, we’re not only contending with a bad start to this production. The ending is also botched thanks to staging that makes no logical sense whatsoever and blunts the final shock.

Third Wall is a company that enjoys taking risks and showcasing good actors. That’s commendable. But this is one of those times when the pay-off is negligible.

The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter

Presented by Third Wall Theatre and 100 Watt productions

Continues to March 30 at the Avalon Studio, 738A Bank Street

Reservations: 613 236 1425 or www.thirdwall.com

Director: Todd Duckworth

Costumes: Vanessa Imeson

Lighting: David Magladry

Set: Graham Price

Sound: James Richardson

Benita: Kristina Watt

Augusta: Mary Ellis