Call a play a “modern classic” and you give it a veneer of respectability. But, although the term is widely applied to Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, I suspect it has lost none of its power to provoke and disturb. The proof will come when Jamie Glover’s revival of Pinter’s 1965 play, now with a cast headed by Keith Allen, Mathew Horne and Shanaya Rafaat, opens at the Theatre Royal Bath before going on a national tour.
So what is it about The Homecoming that upsets people? When I wrote a biography of Pinter in 1996, I discovered that the play was triggered by the experience of one of Pinter’s oldest Jewish friends who went to live in Canada and for 10 years never told his Hackney dad that he had married a Gentile girl and had a family of his own. But Pinter always denied that The Homecoming was either a specifically Jewish play or a transcription of reality. What the play shows is Teddy, now an academic in the US, returning to his north London roots to introduce his wife, Ruth, to his father, his uncle and his two brothers.
