UK playwright Harold Pinter was the master of a menace that sits so close to the surface, it forms lumps in the carpet. Revolving around intimate domestic dynamics warped by unseen but dreadfully felt forces of animosity and repression, his plays have never lost their power to unsettle and suggest. The Homecoming premiered in 1965 during a time of massive social upheaval, when sexual mores and gender expectations were in flux, and it responded to an anxiety about men and women that should feel less familiar to us than it does. There is a vertiginous sense of time collapsing while watching this revival; surely we didn’t come home for this?
The homecoming of the title belongs, at least on first impression, to Teddy (Peter Houghton), one of three sons to ageing north London ex-butcher Max (Richard Piper). Teddy has been away in the US for six years, married now to Ruth (Kate Kendall); the couple have three boys of their own, and while he speaks of marital happiness and family reunions, it’s clear something’s seriously wrong. For a start, Ruth becomes sexually suggestive with Teddy’s lecherous brother Lenny (Ben Geurens) almost the moment they meet, and seems thoroughly unconcerned when other members of the family alternately paw and vilify her. It’s almost as if she’s the one coming home to a dynamic she’s determined to change.
“The firm”, as Max’s brother Sam (David Field, superb) refers to the family, is a hotbed of toxic competitive masculinity, misogyny and deep-rooted sexual insecurity, set in motion years before by the death of Max’s wife and the boys’ mother, Jessie. Eulogised endlessly, the absent mother is a wound into which the men pour their waning machismo, and Pinter has enormous fun poking holes in the male ego, its self-delusions and outright lies. Smarmy one-upmanship and petulant sulking dominate the discourse, which would be unbearable but for the playwright’s keen observational skill and mordant wit. And then there’s Ruth, as enigmatic as she is ruthless, capable of filling a void.
Under Greg Carroll’s smart, sensitive direction, this Australian Shakespeare Company production is tightly wound and deliciously delivered, with a top-notch cast savouring every ambivalence. Kendall is the veiled, shimmering centre, a Persephone with no desire to enlighten or explain; she holds back so convincingly, as if skating placidly over the surface of the role, that her ruptures of emotion feel like revelations flashing in the dark. Piper struggles with his (many) lines, but this folds fortuitously into his interpretation of the part: Max is an old actor, playing the role of the virile bruiser, and it’s only natural he’d be starting to forget his lines. If it’s an intentional directorial decision, it’s ingenious.
Geurens is wonderfully louche and ersatz, oiling his way around the stage and snapping on his polyester grin. Houghton slides imperceptibly from strained composure to seething hatred as the cuckolded Teddy in a performance of great poise, and Eddie Orton is suitably lunkish as boxing brother Joey. Field is a standout, meticulous with every word and gesture. Sam might be an old queen, his pride in his crummy chauffeur job tilting towards bathos, but he’s also the most accepting and genial, the family’s hearth, and Field imbues him with dignity and wry humour.
Much has been made of Pinter’s pauses – the playwright himself described speech as “a constant stratagem to cover nakedness” – but what is vital is the disquieting hum underneath the dialogue, alerting us to more potent subterranean truths. Carroll and his cast marshal this sense of the abstruse with forensic assurance, imposing a dream logic on the petty and tenuous realities of living. While characters seem archetypal rather than psychologically three dimensional, they respond to tangible, if eldritch, gravitational forces.
Carroll’s production doesn’t impose an interpretation on to the play, and it never strains for resonance or relevance; it lets the audience do that work for itself. I found myself thinking about the manosphere, about the ease with which puffed and vulnerable men can be manipulated against their will as long as their insecurities are engaged. I thought about the power of the monstrous feminine, of transformation and renewal. Mostly I thought about the repressed, its tendency to rise up from the depths to wreak havoc. The kind of homecoming you’re unlikely to forget.
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The Homecoming is on at the Athenaeum II, Melbourne until 3 October
