Not worth the journey...
Staggering back from the Young Vic after an early preview of Pinter’s The Homecoming.
That this is not an ‘easy’ play is notorious – it wasn’t when it was first produced and it’s even less so now. Full disclosure, I first saw the 1965 play in about 1967 or 68 (at the New Theatre in Oxford I believe) and directed it myself in 1969 or 70.
There is here a strong cast, in particular Jared Harris as the patriarch Max, Joe Cole as Lenny his second son (the pimp) and Lisa Diveney as Ruth.
The play is about power, of course, the power of family over its members, the exercise of power by individual family members, and the usurpation of power by the outsider, Ruth. Every scene is about power plays. The strength of the play is in the writing (and its pauses) and the ways in which power slips round the stage, for instance as Lenny’s menacing macho stories are ‘called’ by Ruth and his sexual bravado shown up as posturing.
Which means that crashing cymbals and thumping drums are not needed (but we get them!) on denouement moments. Why? Isn’t Pinter’s writing strong enough on its own? (Oh, and some of the lines were so obscured by the crashing that fellow audience members didn’t hear key words).
And when we weren’t getting extraneous sound effects, the lighting started to point the narrative. If you are going to have a broadly realistic set, and you want a chair bathed in sudden light – say to illuminate someone reading a paper - at least pretend it’s a standard lamp doing it, not a travelling spot.
A good version of this leaves the audience stunned by the denouement and shift of power – only later saying – ‘but people don’t act like that’ – as Ruth becomes the family dominatrix and Teddy (her husband of 6 years) slips back to their family of 3 children in the US without his wife and without complaint.
Sadly, we weren’t stunned.