Theatre review: The Homecoming

Matthew Dunster's production of The Homecoming at the Young Vic sets Pinter's play firmly in the 1960s when it was written: The all-male family of East End gangsters at its heart are an insular group, buried away listening to jazz; the female interloper is a vision of the swinging sixties, up on all the latest fashions and wanting the best of them. What the power balance is by the end of the play is always enigmatic, but Dunster's apparently clear telling of the story may leave it murkier than ever. Max (Jared Harris) is the widowed patriarch who raised his three sons on his own - it's unlikely he'd ever acknowledge that his probably-gay brother Sam (Nicolas Tennant,) who's lived with them for decades, might have helped at all.

Their lives with middle son Lenny (Joe Cole,) a vaguely-defined businessman, and youngest Joey (David Angland,) a boxer who's bound to hit the big time once he deals with his only two weaknesses (attack and defence) are an unpredictable mix of affection, bickering and outright aggression.

In the middle of the night, oldest son Teddy (Robert Emms) sneaks back into the house after six years teaching philosophy in America; he brings with him wife Ruth (Lisa Diveney,) who his family don't even know exists. But his father and brothers soon become fixated with the first woman to enter the house in decades, and Ruth plays up to it: By the play's surreal ending it's unclear who's manipulated and trapped whom.

I don't like to be that person who believes there's only one way to do certain plays and anything else is wrong, but there's a distinct Pinteresque element that's usually particularly present in The Homecoming, and is missing here. It is of course the infamous menace, a sense that there's something horrific just out of the audience's sight - I think of it almost as a Lovecraftian eldritch abomination that would drive you crazy if you did catch a glimpse. Here there's darkness, but it doesn't go much beyond what we're told - an ageing father prone to mood swings, who may have been abusive when his sons were little. If the family's steeped in blood it's because we're told they come from generations of butchers.

I'm not entirely sure what Dunster's trying to do by stripping things back like this. Perhaps it's to hold Pinter himself up to scrutiny - the play is subject to endless debate over whether it's about misogyny or just misogynistic and maybe the idea is to expose the ugly side (I mean this is the playwright whose idea of a mea culpa for cheating on his wife was a play where the woman was the one cheating, so you do the maths on that one.)

Whatever the reasons it doesn't quite get under the audience's skin, and it struggles to hold up with the revelations and weirdness after the interval: The menace may have been understated in Act I but there's no hiding the fact that in Act II Lenny's job explicitly turns out to be pimping, or that Joey being "irresistible" to women probably translates to him being a serial rapist. The strange power play of the final scenes, where Ruth appears to have been sucked into a life as her in-laws' slave and prostitute but still seems to have come out on top, is all the stranger for losing its nightmarish context.

I couldn't fault the performances though; Harris is maybe a bit too amiable as Max which probably doesn't help the overall tone, but he's watchable, as is Cole as Lenny, here positioned as the main negotiator on the side of the men. But like Moi Tran's set, which takes the references to a large front room and gives us a vast open space with no sense of claustrophobia, the production as a whole may be a bit too literal to really work.

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter is booking until the 27th of January at the Young Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.