By David Gardette
Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming remains one of the most debated and unsettling plays of the 20th century. Premiering in the West End in 1965, it went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play in 1967. With its sharp, dark humour built around a cryptic storyline, it uncomfortably exposes power struggles, sexual politics and shifting loyalties and is frequently regarded as one of Pinter’s landmark works.
The Homecoming centres on Teddy, a philosophy professor who returns to his childhood home in North London with his wife, Ruth, after years away in America. Reunited with his all-male family: domineering father Max, Uncle Sam, and brothers Lenny and Joey. As the family interacts, old tensions, rivalries, and power struggles quickly emerge. Ruth unexpectedly becomes the focus of the men’s attention, and her relationship with the family grows increasingly complex.
Now playing at the Athenaeum Theatre, the Australian Shakespeare Company’s production embraces the intended darkness and ambiguity. Director and designer Greg Carroll’s understanding of the distinctive Pinter style allows the silences, pauses and uncomfortable tensions to gradually build until the play becomes almost suffocatingly awkward – never losing sight of its dark and often unsettling humour. Carroll’s set design is appropriately bleak, unnerving, while Peter Amesbury’s mood lighting reinforces the heaviness that hangs over the family home.
The ensemble delivers an impressive interpretation of a notoriously difficult work. Richard Piper’s Max is a convincing mean-spirited, often verbally abusive manipulator whose volatility controls much of the first act. As criminally linked son Lenny, Ben Geurens exudes bravado, self-assurance and swagger, capturing the character’s unsettling menace. Joey, the aspiring boxer, is played with an enthusiastic confidence by Eddie Orton, while Peter Houghton delivers an astute performance as Teddy, the returning son whose arrival triggers the play’s central upheaval. Kate Kendall’s quiet yet powerful Ruth, using sexuality as a form of manipulation is increasingly effective as the tensions escalate. As Max’s brother Sam, David Field’s finely nuanced performance brings an occasional welcome subtlety to the family dynamic.
What makes The Homecoming compelling is also what makes it uncomfortable. The toxic family relationships of the first act are unsettling enough, but pale beside the strange and increasingly disturbing developments of the second. Ruth’s growing intimacy with Teddy’s brothers, in full view of her husband, is uneasy to watch. The men’s casual discussions about future “arrangements” for Ruth even more so.
The cleverness of The Homecoming lies in its ambiguity. Who’s homecoming is the title referring to? Is it Teddy’s return to the family he left behind, reconnecting with a father and brothers who know nothing of his wife or children? Or is it Ruth’s journey full circle, from her past life as a “photographic model for the body”, through marriage and motherhood in New York, and back into a dysfunctional environment built around sensuality and power? And this is why The Homecoming is one of theatre’s most challenging plays. Its refusal to provide clear answers continues to provoke debate, leaving audiences to wrestle with its mysteries well beyond the final act.
The Homecoming plays at the Athenaeum Theatre until October 3.
