The Homecoming

Published Tuesday 12 February 2008 at 10:25 by Jeremy Austin

Some of Nicholas Hytner ‘dead white men’ probably won’t agree, but Harold Pinter’s earlier plays are best enjoyed as period pieces.

The Homecoming is one such play. Certainly it is still an intense, gripping, and beautifully-crafted piece of writing (something emphasised with Michael Attenborough’s carefully realised production), yet there is a sense that theatre has come on a long way since this disjointed, vaguely abstracted, highly stylised play first wowed Noel Coward among others.

Even its themes - emasculation, the death of the traditional male etc - are rooted in the sixties and seventies.

Take that as read, and Attenborough’s interpretation of what remains classic Pinter has an intensity that bears down on the audience - an atmospheric pressure that forces them into their seats like a pilot experiencing G-force.

Kenneth Cranham, one of the great masters of Pinter and here playing Max, the fading, tough-talking patriarch, forces his gruff masculinity through his staff like a working class Lear - his madness still enough to suppress his usurping sons.

Of them, Nigel Lindsay’s Lenny soaks up the tension emanating from within the shattered family, distils it and then lets it ooze from within him in a series of controlled, passive-aggressive explosions.

Fuelling all this is Ruth (Jenny Jules) - wife of returning prodigal son Teddy (Neil Dudgeon). Hers is an ethereal interpretation of a character that is representative of so many things she almost fails to exist as a person.

She manages to create a character that is at once dreamlike, but also so solid as to be able to fully manipulate all the men around her.