Super Short Summary

The Dumb Waiter is a 1960 one-act play by British playwright Harold Pinter. A modernist tragicomedy, it tells the story of two hired assassins named Ben and Gus while they wait in a basement room for their target to appear. In their boredom, the hitmen bicker about trivial issues and rehearse the murder. Soon their sense of reality begins to falter, and strange events unfold inside the basement. The play’s absurd series of events is characteristic of Pinter’s work, which exposes the irrational features and backward logic of modern stories and dilemmas.