The Homecoming, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Reviewed,Paul Taylor
Thursday 04 August 2011 00:00 BST
Comments
Strained relations: Harold Pinter's 'The Homecoming'
Strained relations: Harold Pinter's 'The Homecoming' (MANUEL HARLAN)

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

When Peter Hall founded the RSC in 1961, one of his guiding principles was that Shakespeare should be presented in dynamic, mutually illuminating relation to new playwrights. Harold Pinter was the linchpin of this policy. So, as the company celebrates its 50th birthday, it's fitting that it should programme a major revival of one the classic Pinter plays premiered under its auspices – even if the Swan Theatre, with its thrust stage and stacked, horse-shoe-shaped seating is an awkward space for such an intrinsically proscenium arch drama as The Homecoming (1965).

David Farr's assured, savagely funny production proves that this play has lost none of its capacity to discomfit and affront. If you were to imagine an out-of-time collaboration between, say, Ibsen and Hugh Hefner, you'd get some dim idea of the diabolical way the play merges a calculatedly controversial recipe for female liberation with a male porno fantasy. The piece resembles a blackly comic parody of a meet-the-folks drama when prodigal son Teddy, a professor of philosophy in America, returns to introduce Ruth, his wife of six years, to his unsavoury north London family.

In Nicholas Woodeson's superb performance, his father Max, an ex-butcher, struggles to continue to lord it over the men-only household like some flat-capped stick-wielding cockney-Jewish Lear, the ferocity of his rants and the aggression of his emasculating jibes against his boys and brother an index of his failing powers in the Oedipal contest for dominance. As a would-be titillating chat-up line, the pimp son, Lenny (an archly piss-taking Jonathan Slinger) treats his newly discovered sister-in-law to intimidating stories about his penchant for violence against women.

Aislin McGuckin's excellent Ruth radiates provocative poise and self-amusement as she crosses and uncrosses her legs and starts to beat these men at their own power games. But even though her husband (Justin Salinger) seems to put up no fight for her beyond a stricken, supercilious smile, American academe would surely have to be very arid indeed for her to choose to remain as the madonna/whore in his jungle, paying for her keep on her back in Greek Street and, we gather, at home. The play's horrible power partly stems from the lack of any explicit critique of this notion of empowerment, though there is an indirect one here as the red light intensifies over the final grisly tableau of a travesty pieta, replete pimp, corpse, and stroke-afflicted patriarch.

In rep to 15 October (0844 800 1110)

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in