The Dumb Waiter (The Lift)

Two men, Ben and Gus, engage in a casual conversation while they are waiting. They are the central characters of The Lift. But who are they? Where are they? Where have they come from? What do they do? What has happened to them?.. And what exactly are they waiting for, in this charged atmosphere of menace and silence, of looming threat and unsettling ambiguity?..
At its heart, this is a play about whether it is possible — or even permissible — to preserve one’s sanity and sense of humanity, to make a difficult moral choice within a system that monitors every word, every movement.
The Dumb Waiter is widely regarded as the finest of Harold Pinter’s early plays — a darkly absurd chamber piece that provided the blueprint for Martin McDonagh’s first feature film, In Bruges, the now-iconic British-American crime thriller.
Harold Pinter stands as one of the most influential dramatists of the twentieth century. Nobel Laureate in Literature (2005), he was recognised for plays that, in the words of the Swedish Academy, “uncover the precipice beneath everyday prattle and force entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.
The Lift is a contemporary reflection on the eternal tension between conscience and command, between the machinery of systems and the fragile interior of the individual.
It's a haunting meditation on the condition of being human now.