On the Dynamics of The Dumb Waiter淺析哈羅德品特戲劇的動(dòng)態(tài)特征

Pinter, like the other absurdist playwrights, likes to adopt one-act form in which a single background persists throughout the whole story, as opposed to the constantly-changing scenes of the traditional. However, Pinter’s theatrical space differs from the classical one in two aspects. Firstly, in appearance, absurdists like to adopt desolate, dreary and alienating scene to symbolize the miserable human existence like that in Waiting for Godot is only “a tree, a road in the country and dusk”, while Pinter’s is often an everyday room with vast warmth and coziness. While on the other hand, to say that Pinter’s dramatic background is often a room is too simplistic a generalization to write off his profundity and complexity. As Pinter doesn’t establish anything substantial as the stage background but rather his room in its essence, connotes the interaction between two spaces: the space in the room and outside the room. If the room represents the inner world of the characters and the world outside it is the incomprehensible and uncontrollable universe, the two spaces are interacting from the very beginning, as in The Dumb Waiter, Gus’ constant motion is a revealing evidence of his feeling threatened and afraid of the outside world, and Ben’s keeping silence all the time is in fact a self-protective strategy, because we all understand that every room must has a door which means the outside world may intrude at any time. As in The Dumb Waiter, three mysterious symbols: the matches slid from the outside, the dumb waiter and the speaking tube on the wall clearly inform us that the world we see is indeed intersected with another world we’re kept in dark with.  

Dynamic characters: voids to fill
　　 In effect, a large part of the dynamics in Pinter’s theatre is realised through interaction. If we can say that on a macro level, Pinter’s dramatic background is established by the interaction between the inner world of the room with the world outside it then against such a backdrop, the movement of the figures may be generalized to the interactions of each’s psychological world with the others’ around. In Pinter’s plays, the characters appear on the stage as some grotesques without any identification or background, but none of them can be abstracted to some void symbol nor can they be substituted for one another, but rather, we will recognise at the first sight that every character is particular and irreplaceable. Like in The Dumb Waiter，when Gus and Ben firstly appear on the stage, we are well able to distinguish them from one another. Ben is the dedicated, more static and the superior while Gus is the idle, more anxious and the inferior. But it doesn’t stop at that.
　　Another singularity of Pinter’s characterisation is that, the particularity of every character is alive and constantly growing. As is illustrated above, the background of Pinter’s theatre is precarious and subject to the outside intrusion, every time the outside world intrudes, the inner equilibrium of the original room will be broken, then the room serves as a different background, in which the characters must readapt to the changed situation, while in this process, more facets of their characteristics will be shown. On another level, the intrusion from outside is always in the form of an uninvited visitor. By close examination, it is easy to note that Pinter’s characters are not only presented as intruders into each other’s self-presumed world that disillusion them, but also the complementary drive for each other, just like what Pinter said himself: “ These two things—the man in relation to society—both exist and one makes the other. Society wouldn’t be there without the man, but they are both dependent to one another and there’s no question of hero and villain.” It is by constantly getting involved into the interaction with other people around that the heroes gradually find the truth about themselves as well as the truth about life. At the beginning of the play, we always see the characters are living happily in their isolated space with their invented identity or stories of their history, more obvious examples are Davies in The Caretaker and Stanley in The Birthday Party. But the story really begins when the alien elements come from the outside world threatening to subvert their fabricated stable world at the same time serving as a mirror for the characters to see themselves objectively or at least from another perspective.(This point is most tellingly shown on James in The Collection.) But most importantly, the outcome will be the hero get suffocated under the overwhelming pressure or he takes advantage of such opportunity to break away from the former illusion to get closer to the truth depends mainly on their ability to make appropriate changes to strike a new equilibrium in incorporating the new arrivals to restabilize the harmony. 
　　As in The Dumb Waiter，we can say that Ben and Gus are mutual intruders into each other’s world. Struggling under the same suffocating pressure and fright, they adopted distinct countermeasures: throughout the whole play, the innocent and more sober Gus who sharply discerns their treacherous situation and the best solution of fighting against it in cooperation is all the way attempting to incorporate Ben into his world by constantly start conversations to draw his attention. But his plan is miserably and regrettably crashed in front of Ben’s foggy illusion and stubborn refusal to step out of it. Because Ben has his different plan: he sleekly protects himself by concealing all private information and trying to play a dominant figure and a more capable killer than Gus hoping that the organization may recognize it and offer a chance for life to him. Here arises a serious situation, the other party has become a crucial factor determining the success of their plans: if they hope to make valid of their own plan, they must take the other’s into consideration and call upon the other party to cooperate with them. This is a classical prisoner’s dilemma in which one party’s failure determines the same fate for the other.                                   
　　
The underlying plots of The Dumb Waiter
　　The irrationality and illogicality of absurdist theme required the theatrical structure to be loosely connected, desultory and random which in turn made the development of the story cyclical or fragmented with no causal link or any organic connection. However, in appearance, Pinter’s theatre is largely constructed with incomprehensible actions and illogical expressions which made the story telling rather slow or just in stasis, but indeed, every single action or expression of the heroes is gaining strength along some logical lines to the final explosion at the end. However absurd the end of the story of Pinter seems, if we trace back we can always find the rationality and certainty of it. 
　　Prelude: Gus is on the stage constantly making meaningless and absurd actions showing his inner fear and anxiety, while Ben’s frequent watching of Gus suggested his disapproval of or even superiority over him. We may sense here that they are not real colleagues; there must be some conflicts between them. Then comes the cruel and ridiculous news event which foretells that this may be a bloody or thrilling story; although in appearance absurd and unbelievable, it is indeed actual and happening.  
　　Development:  Stage 1: the first silence after the discussion over the news event to the second news event: we hear Gus keeps rambling about his interests, its and asking Ben for something, while Ben only kept silent or appears to be immerged in the news reading, only sometimes impatiently orders Gus to quicken his service to him. Here we notice that Gus is purposely trying to involve Ben into communication with him, but his attempt consistently failed because of Ben’s refusal to cooperate. Until the second news event appears do we get the information that Gus and Ben are actually having very different worldviews and values, although they appear to be colleagues they are on very different grounds.
　　Stage 2: the second news event to the sliding in of the matches: We hear Gus all the time complaining about their living environment and the dull routine of their lives and even ventured to ask Ben to explain his motivation of stopping the car which predicts his rebellion against him. These show Gus’s sickness of his stagnant life which has been made depressing with the suspicion of Ben.
　　While on Ben’s part, we see he continued his perfunctory and void response to Gus. When talking about the football team Villa he even lied to Gus, that leads us to suspect that Ben must be concealing something, his disapproval and impatience with Gus is merely a pretense. At the time the matches are slid in, we observe that Ben is actually very coward and weak as he dares never confront the outside world himself but can only rely on Gus, however, Gus, seemingly the subordinate, is actually more powerful and strong as he has the courage to face the uncertainty and verify for himself even if facing life-threatening situations.
　　(Side clue: the sliding in of the matches indicates the outside world is all the time interacting with their world which is not isolated at all. ) 
　　Stage 3: Gus rebels against Ben’s authority as shown by the argument over a simple phrase and even further ventures to try to probe into the secrets of the organization and to take side by his victim.
　　Climax: (the side clue involved into the main body) the appearance of the dumb waiter: The characters are finally brought face to face with the uncontrollable and hostile world. After they are both pressured into “dumb waiters”, their disguises are eventually torn down. Gus laid bare his unbearable anxiety and frightenedness by beginning to rebel against Ben and at the same time against the organization while Ben, in front of the desperate Gus’ rapid-fire questions, can only resort to reading newspaper or exercising violence which is an obvious indication of his same emptiness but different strategy or personality with Gus. This point is further illustrated by the last reading of the news event before the curtain falls.
　　End: The conflict between Ben and Gus starting from verbal and developing to physical, finally reached its climax stage: killing.
　　
Absurd language : interaction with the audience
   The basic reason for many critics to identify Pinter as an absurdist is that his theatre is often wrapped up in an ambiguous and mysterious atmosphere built up with various uncertain elements in our very realistic life, such as uncertain security, uncertain identity, uncertain reference which altogether point right to the uncertainty of people’s psychology which surfaced as the ambiguous interpersonal communication on the stage. Pinter’s language can be said to be structured in three dimensions: the character-character level, the character-self level and the author-audience level.
　　　In traditional theatre, the dialogues are supposed to be presented in complete version and every sentence must make sense. But such principles ignored a crucial and significant fact that in real-situation, there seldom appears any completed sentences or logical and grammatical utterances but rather people tend to imply things to each other. The possibility for us to obtain the appropriate information majorly depends on our cooperative attitude which indicates that to make successful communication; the participants must have a common purpose in mind and cooperate to move the conversation along toward the agreed destination. However, in Pinter’s theatre, the characters are always uncooperative, which according to the linguistic theory, must lead to failed communication. In this sense, the seeming broken conversations and irrelevant rambling goes exactly in conformity with realistic situations without any artistic refinement.
　　But Pinter’s innovation in theatrical language doesn’t stop at his venture to put the crude realistic language with its whole absurdity onto the stage. “Uncooperative attitude” is the first key word to grasp the core of Pinter’s realistic theatrical language while another is “psychological connection”. If Pinter’s characters are really distinct from each other in every aspect and they even don’t share any common ground in conversation, there would be no possibility of conversation at all. But the fact that they are constantly involved in the battle against each other is an indication that if we can put aside all the apparent differences between identity, background, culture, and history, there must be some link connecting the two parties and that link is humanity. Pinter’s implication is that however desolate the world will become man can never be alienated into non-human because humanity remains ever intact within us, and no matter how separate we are in worldviews, values, personalities and social levels, we are ever integrated with each other as human kind. If the cooperative attitude should serve as the essential for the successful communication among different characters, then the existence of humanity must serve as the essential for the successful interaction between the author and the audience.
　　On Pinter’s theatrical stage, we always see ambiguous characters using ambiguous utterance to express themselves. But Pinter doesn’t intend his ambiguity to call upon the audience to contemplate with brain, but rather, to understand Pinter, we are required to make our hearts fully open, we don’t need to infer, to guess, to figure out the motives of the different characters, what we should do is just to consider the characters as just our incarnations, then we may intuitively sympathize with them and see the story as happening on ourselves. It is easy because the author deliberately prevented us from any preconception toward the characters by providing no specific information but rather, we must fill the void with our own experience and feeling, in such a process, we are actually identifying ourselves with the characters and discovering the truth of ourselves while not trying to get familiar with a new friend like we often do when watching traditional theatre. To truly exercise this process, we may gradually become aware of mechanism persistently at work in our heart, which suggests the existence of an eternal link integrating all human being into one：the humanity. In Pinter’s viewpoint, no matter what happens in the outside world, there is no possibility for us to be alienated into non-human as the other absurdist termed. In view of this, Pinter’s characters are constantly interacting with each other and they must solve their surviving problems with the help of each other. Getting involved into an exaggerated but familiar struggle, the audience watching the plays are urged to take action with the characters in search of the final truth about their desolate life and world and the valid solution to get out of it. To conclude, Pinter’s theatre presented us a living chance to entre into the other’s life, and sense the eternally- present humanity in ourselves.
　　To reestablish our sense of security or identity, the method of self-isolation and delusion is never applicable, because we are living under the same pressure and threat, and we can never be excluded as the others or exclude the others. The sense of security is established when we learned to empathize with the intruder and take his need into consideration and the true identity of ourselves is established in the process of gaining meaning for our existence in the life of the others. It is not the world and life that are deprived of any meaning, and that men are incommunicable, but that people are unwilling to communicate and cooperate. It is not that the world is incomprehensible but that the psychological need of the people is lacking in sympathy and understanding.