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man’s land. The play is characterized by confusion about localization (or illocalization) and about performative categorizations such as criminal/non-criminal -- philosophical problems that the theater is

ideally equipped to demonstrate on account of the complexity and fluidity of its various actual and fictional spaces. The basement kitchen -- neither fully operational nor entirely defunct -- is a zone of undecidability that plays host to extraordinary, arbitrary, decisional power. The scenario of the two assassins, who lie in wait for a victim to enter a trap and who answer to an authority whose workings are (quite literally) above their heads, defines spatiality and the implicit topology of power as vital to the play’s meaning.

This image of an anomic space, of a room that is going to prove exceptional, is strengthened by Pinter’s creation of a dramatic object-world that does not behave according to the received conventions of realist theater, even though the play can be described as realist to the extent that it takes a “critical look at… state power…

power used to undermine, if not destroy the individual, or the questioning voice” (Knowles 25). Begley’s essay observes how the

“background awakens and moves to the center, as the sorts of details that realism asks to be compliant and quiescent -- crockery, toilet, burner, bed sheets, matches, dumb waiter -- become sites of consternation and alarm.” In The Dumb Waiter, as in the early non-dramatic works Kullus and “The Examination,” architectural space is portrayed as quasi-animate and aggressive and the characters’ distress is suggested chiefly as an effect that the building and its contents (toilet, gas meter, cooker) have on them. Certainly, the perennial question in Pinter’s plays of dominance and subservience is thrown into relief by the conceit of a mechanized dumbwaiter that enslaves the humans it was built to serve.

Stranded at the interstices of sovereign and disciplinary power, the men are forced to remain in a condition similar to house arrest until they receive the next order. Whereas the play’s various off-stage locations vacillate between secret places dimly remembered and the kind of glaring geographical specificity noted in Begley’s “Return of the Referent,” Gus and Ben’s world is always narrowly confined.

As the play unfolds, we learn that the hired hit-men spend their time detained in a series of non-places and that, even in their own homes, they are constantly “on tap… you can’t move out of the house in case a call comes” (1996, 7). According to Gus, the two barely see daylight: “I mean, you come into a place when it’s still dark, you

come into a room you’ve never seen before, you sleep all day, you do your job, and then you go away in the night again” (1996, 118).

Within the acting area, a certain siege mentality is explainable in terms of architecture’s function of containment and of the tension created by the door -- the threshold between interior and exterior, unknowable space. However, to a great extent, the horror of the situation in the basement room is that the machinery of the dumbwaiter becomes a law unto itself. When it clatters into action mid-way through the play, it places impossible demands on the hit-men for dishes that range from “Soup of the Day” and “Jam Tarts” to

“Macaroni Pastitsio” and “Char Sui and Beansprouts.” Eventually, it will send down the order that the target, who has “arrived and will be coming in straight away,” should be exterminated using the “normal method” (1996, 148). Thus, to the phenomenological idea of the room as the experienced space through which we think all space, our basic mental unit of architecture, Pinter adds the projection of our fears about the transformation of the room into a deadly trap, casting the putative safety of built space into grave doubt.⁸

By exploiting the theater’s emphasis on object-hood, Pinter shows how structural and spatial mechanisms can facilitate power’s thanato-political drive, the unmediated subjection of life to death that Agamben sees as inscribed into Western politics. Reading Pinter’s treatment of space and place retroactively as the dramatization of a

“geography of exception,” we might even say that The Dumb Waiter maps the co-ordinates of the new biopolitical order. Gus’ only crime is that he has begun to question aspects of his job. What his transformation into intended victim points to is a regime so ruthless in its treatment of opposition that it can only be described as totalitarian, although the play’s topographical specificity, its Birmingham setting and its reference to the London- and midlands-based football teams Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa, can leave us in little doubt that it takes place in Britain.

Most alarmingly, Gus and Ben’s work involves arriving at designated sites of execution to assassinate anonymous individuals for reasons unknown. Pinter has reminded us in his work as a campaigner for human rights as well as in later plays that the overwhelming majority of citizens subjected to state atrocities in numerous countries around the world have committed no crime but “their very existence is an offence, since that existence in some way or another poses critical

questions or is understood to do so” (1985, 16).Through the specific circumstances of The Dumb Waiter, it is already possible to see a diagram immanent to the wider social field. I see the predicament of the comic stooges as suggestive of how sections of civil society find themselves languishing inexplicably before a law that has been reduced to the zero degree of its significance, but is nevertheless still in force. In the latter part of the twentieth century, this has been played out by modern states that can eliminate “whole categories of the population that resist being integrated into the political system”

through the voluntary creation of emergency situations (Agamben 2005, 2).

This reading of the labyrinthine power structure and its abandoned execution rooms as state-sanctioned is all the more persuasive in light of The Hothouse, in which the “Ministry” uses a secure hospital to conduct biopolitical experiments on a group of numbered inmates. Both plays are remarkable for representing the almost militaristic operations of power and, once we accept that the levels of bureaucracy alluded to throughout The Dumb Waiter gesture not towards criminality but towards officialdom, we can readily appreciate how the tactics of the secret state and governance by exception might be implicated in the play’s gangster codes. The men are members of a network large enough to have “departments for everything,” to take on “senior partners,” to put new staff through rigorous “tests” and to be bound by statutory rights such as holiday time (1996, 131; 118; 146). For this reason, I find Esslin’s explanation of the two characters as terrorists constructed along the lines of the IRA unlikely (1993, 30). His identification of Gus and Ben as the first in a long line of professional executioners and/or torturers that stand at the heart of Pinter’s work and that include both “terrorist cells” and the “Kafkaesque secret police organizations of the totalitarian world”

is doubtless right but few would argue that Pinter’s principle concern is with illegal organizations (1993, 30).

In fact, it is Kafka’s insistence that the most sinister abuses of power are official and not criminal that gives Pinter’s work its peculiar edge; that uneasy knowledge that we share with the playwright that even his funniest play is only “funny up to a point”

(qtd in Tennyson). Gus’ reference to being driven through the night to reach the basement flat somewhere in Birmingham recalls the

dénouement of Kafka’s The Trial, in which Joseph K. is taken through the night-time streets to visit the place of his execution. Both episodes have a dreaminess that belies the seriousness of the situation. Kafka writes of how the “moon shone down on everything with that simplicity and serenity which no other light possesses” (1992, 249) Pinter has Gus say: “It was still dark, don’t you remember? I looked out. It was all misty” (1996, 119). Cut off from the rest of their society in basement ‘camps,’ dumbly waiting, Gus and Ben are subjected to the same disjunctive fusions of “law” and “rule,” “right” and “order”

that Kafka (in Agamben’s reading) presents as part of the machinery of power that is able to draw a performative boundary between those to whom it is prepared to extend certain (provisional) privileges and the “life that does not deserve to live” (Agamben 1998, 136-43).

Closely linked to this situation, in which an escalation of orders and instructions is matched by increasing lawlessness, are the questions of responsibility and the construction of criminality. In Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism, Begley argues convincingly that one of the main purposes of the two newspaper articles that Ben reads aloud at the beginning of the play is to call into question the “black-and-whiteness” of the world (89). Taking up his theme, I want to highlight the killers’ (and our) uncertainty about the position and precision of juridical, political and ethical boundaries in this play. On such a shifting terrain, transgression and culpability are hard to pin down. The anecdote of the eighty-seven year-old man who was killed when he crawled underneath a lorry, and the story about the little girl involved in the cat-killing incident, contain hints that the real power of decision-making may have been located elsewhere: in the first story, with some unknown adviser; in the second, with the child’s older brother, who is ghoulishly supposed to have watched the whole thing from a nearby toolshed. As Gus and Ben struggle to supply an acceptable causality that would justify each lurid “effect” in Ben’s paper, the sub-text hints at the anomy and disorder that Agamben sees as the salient features of the contemporary political scene. In this juridically derelict space, the killers’ anxiety about protocol, precedent and right is signalled in almost every one of their exchanges. When Gus hears what happened to the old man, his language takes on legal overtones: “who advised him to do a thing like that?” (1996, 114).

But, if his words invoke legality, their effect on the audience is to

heighten perception of the gap between “public law” and “political fact” or the facts of life-as-it-is-lived (Agamben 2005, 1).

Pinter opposes contrasting conceptions of order (as coercive rule, as justice or right and as natural order) throughout The Dumb Waiter. Subversions of protocol and the natural order may be “enough to make you want to puke,” but use of the joke format together with the sheer outlandishness of the events that Ben describes are genuinely funny (1996, 114). Gus’ challenge to the hierarchical order between himself and Ben -- as demonstrated in the “light the kettle” sequence, when Ben unthinkingly concedes linguistic victory to his subordinate -- combines humor with an unnerving sense that the men’s roles are interchangeable. Also blackly amusing is Gus’ mention of a football game they once saw, which elicits an initial denial of having been there from Ben, but ends with Ben’s vigorous correction of Gus’

memory of play. “Dispute” and “foul play” are repeated motifs of the men’s conversation (1996, 121). Later, in a phrase he shares with Goldberg, the more bullying partner from The Birthday Party, Ben will accuse Gus of “playing a dirty game” (1996, 134).

Whereas most critics have shown less interest in Ben than in Gus, I want to insist that Pinter’s theme of dis/order is most effectively explored through the pairing of both. What makes Ben such a good character is that he convinces us of how power co-opts certain individuals, forcing them to act as its agents. Like the Jewish guard in the concentration camp, whose survival was predicated on his willingness to assist in expediting and organizing the Nazi terror, Ben is simultaneously perpetrator and victim. His supposed allegiance to the authority in The Dumb Waiter is made apparent in the great deference with which he speaks through the tube (1996, 139), and his refusal to empathize with his partner:

What do you want a window for? … What are you complaining about? … (1996, 118)

Moreover, his tendency to rationalize aspects of the situation unnerves Gus. He even goes as far as to suggest that Gus’ disquiet stems from the absence of diverting hobbies in his life. But, in truth, Ben’s position could hardly be more precarious. After all, power feels no obligation to those whose service it has extracted from them. It simply

moves on, as do Ben’s imagined restaurateurs, who move because they “don’t find it a going concern” (1996, 132).