The Homecoming review

Harold Pinter’s rancid family drama from the mid-1960s is back, and once again, it prompts a pair of conflicting observations. First, it reminds us what a peerless master of dialogue he was: the nuance in every jagged phrase – the gut-churning tension, the sewer-waft of choked-down trauma and festering grievance – is simply astonishing, making many more recent playwrights look like ham-fisted amateurs.

Second, even in a pungent, gripping and nastily funny production by Matthew Dunster, the play proves itself to be insoluble. Its climax, which sees the daughter-in-law of a tyrannical north London patriarch choose to become surrogate mother and lucrative sex worker to him, his brother and his sons is superficially presented as an act of female subversion, in which she throws off the shackles of married respectability to assume dominion over the household. But it makes no psychological sense, and in fact Pinter scarcely seems interested in accounting for her perverse decision; while the men, and their history, are depicted with a welter of intricate and disturbing implication, the woman remains little more than an enigmatic blank.

But if Dunster can’t square that circle – and I’m not convinced that any director could – he does deliver a tremendously acted staging that compels remorselessly. In Moi Tran’s design, the living room of the family home, ruled by father Max (Jared Harris), has a decayed stylishness. The once-smart furniture and the circular rug – which becomes like a boxing ring for violent and sexual face-offs – are revoltingly stained; a rocking chair, former throne of Max’s dead wife, sits vacant.

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