This is “The Homecoming,” but whose homecoming is it? As is often the case with Harold Pinter, nothing is what is seems.It’s a revival of the late Nobel laureate’s play, coming home to the London stage, 50 years on of course. Newcomers to the drama may naturally imagine that it’s about a fleeting return to his north London family roots for expatriate US university professor Teddy, played here by Gary Kemp.But soon our attention turns elsewhere, especially to his British wife Ruth, who gets a wonderfully measured portrayal by Gemma Chan.She is sitting before Teddy and his working-class family of four other men, sexually teasing them. She’s as cool as a cucumber. “Look at me. I … move my leg.” She stretches, and the testosterone-crazy men watch agog. So do we. “That’s all it is. But I wear … underwear … which moves with me …it… captures your attention. Perhaps you misinterpret.”She then lightly announces “I was born quite near here” and the penny drops: It’s really all about HER homecoming.Over the half century since the play was first staged, with Pinter’s first wife Vivien Merchant as Ruth, sexual politics have moved on. Even in the swinging 1960s, this was a slightly problematic work and certainly open to misinterpretation.Chan has to fine-tune her role to show that while Ruth has a successful husband, three children and a posh house in the Californian sun, she is desperately unhappy – so much so she is apparently ready to turn herself into a prostitute with a dodgy family and dingy home in rainy London. Albeit with a nice three-room apartment near Curzon Street for her to entertain clients.The casting by Jamie Lloyd is faultless. Kemp, 56, moving ever further from his Spandau Ballet roots, looks 35 going on 65 as he turns into Teddy, a philosopher so detached from reality he seems not to care that his wife is going upstairs for two hours of sexual foreplay with his muscular younger brother Joey (John Macmillan).There is menacing music between scenes and as Teddy delivers key lines: “how certain people can maintain...intellectual equilibrium. Intellectual equilibrium.”Pinter’s plays have a lot going for them: The trademark silence and pauses we call Pinteresque. The menace – here with pimp Lemmy (John Simm) trying to strangle a clock and warning Ruth about the number of women he has gladly beaten up or thought about killing. Only a ridiculous argument about a cheese roll is more silly than scary. Then there’s the humor – sharp one-liners, especially from father figure Max (Ron Cook): “we haven’t had a whore in this house since your mother died.”When he first meets Ruth, Max immediately assumes that she’s a prostitute – a dilemma at the heart of the play, with its characters seeing women as either mothers or tarts, nothing else. Some of the quips get big laughs. Others get gasps in 2015, maybe guffaws of embarrassment. On the way out on Gala Night, one playgoer was arguing with her male companion: “Pinter was sexist, this was appalling.” The guy she was with joked back: “Yes, it was appalling. I liked it very much.” Open to misinterpretation, you see.Keith Allen (father of Lily Allen) plays Max’s brother as the most ineffectual chauffeur inside what is now the M25.Lloyd takes this classic product of the 1960s with its twisted plot and delivers it as an unapologetic time-capsule. The barren set, with dilapidated furniture and naked lightbulbs, suits the mood.Ron Cook creates a wonderfully exaggerated Godfather figure for Max, a stick-waving patriarch and retired butcher with suitably bloody metaphors about cutting people up.He’s like a cross between Arthur Daley, Reggie Kray, Don Corleone and Alf Garnett. Speaking of Garnett, Warren Mitchell did the role in a 1991 show I remember at the Comedy Theatre – now that Peter Hall revival was outstanding. That was a long time ago, as was the 1960s.So for now, and into next year, here’s another “Homecoming” which, while not perfect, has plenty of plus points to remember. The very long slow fade at the end, after the words “kiss me,” won’t fade for a long time.“The Homecoming” continues at Trafalgar Studios, Whitehall, London, through Saturday February 13 2016.
↧