I've never seen a Harold Pinter before. Here I experienced five minutes of the famous Pinter pause - no-one said anything for a whole five minutes. Nor have reading the newspaper and tying shoes laces ever been as fascinating as done by David Thewlis and Daniel Mays.
The premise is this - two hit men are resting or hidden in a restaurant basement, in Birmingham, awaiting their next job. With time on their hands, they try to make the tea - there is after all a kitchen, but there's no gas....Things become increasingly tense as the 'dumb waiter' kicks into action and starts requesting orders. They don' have any food! They begin to wonder (as the restaurant is meant to be abandoned) who is there and wanting lots of menu requests. From his Mary Poppins-like bag, one of the men produces the remains of a packet of biscuits, a bottle of milk, an Eccles cake, a packet of crisps, a bar of chocolate and a box of tea. In sweat and terror, the items are sent up - the tea is returned and the other items, apart from the crisps, critiqued badly. What does it all mean? Then they discover a speaking tube and try to find out who's up there....and what their next order might be...
They prepare a plan for their next hit - which ends in a surprise denouement!
What could have been a rather dull play about two men and two beds trapped in an archaic grey box become tense and fascinating as David Thewlis and Daniel Mays inject character into their hit men.
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