In one of this column’s earliest pieces, I had written about a site-specific work based on Harold Pinter’s provocative two-hander The Dumb Waiter . It was showcased at a suburban house in the backwoods of Yari Road, a bourgeois port of call fast emerging as a running gag in many recent plays, and ironically home to several theatrewallahs. Director Tushar Pandey had staged the play in a cramped kitchen that passed off as a stuffy backroom harbouring the play’s bickering duo, Ben and Gus (Nitin Bhajan and Purnanand Wandhekar), hitmen who go unnamed in this Hindi adaptation by Sumedh and Harsh Khurana. The onlookers, packed like sardines in the living area, had watched the proceedings via CCTV camera-like footage on three television screens— a pinhole viewing experience that made the airless setting seem even more claustrophobic, both for the attendees and the actors, cut away but still acutely aware of the walls having ears, in more ways than one. Last week, Pandey premiered the play at Prithvi Theatre, whose intimate settings must have nevertheless seemed particularly capacious for the purposes of staging this production. However, Pandey’s outfit, Push and Pull Theatre, certainly proved to be up for the challenge.
Working with conventional spaces
Scenographer Asheish Nijhawan and his team created an incarceration chamber cloistered in one corner of the stage by steel frames and a wire mesh, opening up space for on-the-ground seating on the burnished Prithvi floorboards (that we are so often requested to never step on). On the backdrop, live video coverage of the same chamberfrom atop was projected in full colour. Thus, the facets of the original design were put in place. Odds and ends strewn about gave off a sense of tasteful clutter, but it all seemed a little roomy, opened out instead of being closed in. The surveillance camera signalled the idea that the two men were being constantly watched, but did not contribute to an atmosphere of foreboding. Part of this is because the elegant stage at Prithvi is attuned to aesthetic viewing. The grit and the grime are often to be delivered by performance alone. When Bhajan delivered his opening lines, we were quite immediately reminded of Pinter’s trademark wryness, that has been lionised with its own adjective in the English lexicon: ‘Pinteresque’. The faithful translation certainly worked as a homage to the great master, the ambiguity of ideas and elements of absurdness intact. Yet, it also came across as adequately authentic in a new tongue. Wandhekar slipped in and out of a Hyderabadi accent that gave his performance a colloquial flavour and allowed him to stand in some contrast to Bhajan, with his conservative chasteness of delivery. The verbal sparring between the two worked off this dynamic of class difference, hierarchy and temperament. Wandhekar’s child-like inquisitiveness, so ingratiating to Bhajan, acquires a sinister quality when he brandishes a gun quite perfunctorily. There is certainly a world of intrigue and murkiness foregrounded by the material, but this staging seemed to lack a subtext that is unsettling or immediate, even with all the markers ostensibly in place. There was a finesse to the proceedings, and rarely a false note, yet at times, it does feel like we were simply looking at a framed photograph whose layers haven’t been peeled back yet. An Indian ethos is perhaps culturally removed from the universe of Pinter’s play, but the lunacy of the underground as a potent parable for our times has often been effectively represented on Indian celluloid. The play gets its title from ‘dumbwaiter’, an elevator-like contraption that carries small consignments between the floors of a building, like food orders in a restaurant from a kitchen in a basement. It is effectively simulated, with light and sound and a hatch in the wall, as well as a projection of the actor’s faces as they peered into it with wonderment. It provided us with the occasional dramatic escape, as we waited to discover its contents, and struggled to make meaning from the clues it left behind.
The unseen hand, or the unwritten and unimagined agent provocateur , is perhaps something the play could make better use of to rescue it from the stalemate it eventually reaches.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic.