Half a century ago no British playwright created such a fresh, dramatic stir as Harold Pinter.

How pleasing to discover this 1957 one-acter, a black comedy of suspense and menace, dove-tailed with a cat-and-mouse thriller in which the mouse never realises he is being hunted, has lost none of its potency.

The play's abiding strangeness and capacity to induce mystified laughter lingers on, thanks to Harry Burton's beautifully nuanced production and even more to a mesmerising, definitive performance by Lee Evans in which comedy and pathos are entwined.

Set in a delapidated basement, an area into which no normal Fifties play would have dreamed of venturing, The Dumb Waiter plays fresh variations on the theme of Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Two youngish men, formal in braces and black trousers, lie sprawled on narrow iron beds. Peter McIntosh's design, with its filthy back wall from which most tiles have vanished to a floor whose lino has perished, reeks of decay.

A waiting-game is launched, but for what or whom? Evans's hilarious Gus, eyes vacant and feet splayed, face swivelling like a ruminant tortoise, regards life as a crossword puzzle from which almost all the clues have been expunged.

No wonder he bombards his senior partner, Jason Isaacs's tougher, over-relaxed Ben, who reads choice shock-horror items from a broadsheet newspaper, with questions and complaints.

Gus has been ridiculously categorised as a political protester against conformity's forces. As Evans plays him he emerges as a fall-guy of a brutalised, anarchic, authoritarian society, a close relation of psychologically tortured Stanley in Pinter's The Birthday Party and mentally-damaged Aston in The Caretaker. He acquires the poignancy of a man out of his depth, flailing in three feet of water.

The suspense comes in disturbing flurries, entwined with absurdist comedy. A letter containing 12 matches is thrust under the door; a brandished revolver sparks the realisation the men are hired killers waiting their victim's arrival.

As if a restaurant existed upstairs, the dumbwaiter of the double-eged title comes hurtling down the lift-shaft with meal orders to which the killers comically react by despatching their own paltry snacks.

A palpable sense of foreboding rises as they rehearse their familiar, murderous moves. The catastrophe comes hurtling out of the blue.

Full price tickets for 60 minutes is a bit steep, but wow - what a vintage theatrical hour it is!