For many people The Homecoming is Harold Pinter’s masterpiece. Jamie Lloyd celebrates the play’s 50th birthday with a highly stylized and totally non-realistic production. The sparse set, the tableaux, the loud music and the black-outs increase the artificiality. Rich in irony and ambiguity, Pinter’s lethally colloquial script offers possibilities for many interpretations.
Max, ex-criminal, lives with Sam, his brother, and his two sons, Lenny, a violent pimp and Joey, a dumb boxer. Teddy, his eldest son, a Doctor of Philosophy, returns from America with his wife, Ruth. The household immediately recognises her for what she is and Ruth, unhappy with the aridity of academia is quite prepared to be a poule de luxe in London and a surrogate mother to her husband’s family.
Always effortlessly superior, refusing to be intimidated, Ruth manoeuvres herself into a position where she is in complete control. Gemma Chan has the two major requisites for the role – she is enigmatic and she has a good pair of legs. The men are emasculated.
Ron Cook is in top form as the brutish, vindictive Max, who no longer frightens his three sons, whom he quite obviously did not father and whom he abused when they were children. John Simm is very Pinteresque as the streetwise Lenny, who beats up old ladies and takes the Mickey. Keith Allen is good casting for Uncle Sam, a prim chauffeur who knows a thing or two about Max’s late wife that Max doesn’t know.