The Homecoming - Young Vic

This strange and menacing piece by Pinter, the master of making audiences feel uncomfortable. As in his screenplay for Joseph Losey's film The Servant, the playwright forces us to contemplate ordinary human situations in new ways, asking us uneasy questions : who's the master and who's the servant? The title refers to the coming home from America of Edward, a philosophy professor, the elder of three brothers, seemingly to introduce his sexy young wife, Ruth, to a family made up entirely of men: the patriarch, Max, a retired butcher who struggles to hold on to his diminished fatherly authority; uncle Sam, a chauffeur; and Teddy's two brothers: Lenny, who we understand is a pimp, and Joey, the younger one, a boxer, and a kind of gentle brute. They all descend on Ruth like a pack of wolves, but she's no pushover, and soon controls the household, taking the role left by the deceased mother - "we have not had a whore under this roof since your mother died", says Max in a jolly voice, rather intriguingly. All make Ruth somewhat menacing sexual propositions, which she faces with easy poise, turning the wolves into lambs at her feet, to the point that Teddy eventually goes back to America alone. We understand that Ruth stays, gladly joining the gang and somehow taking the role of the absent mother. I wondered what a modern feminist/activist would make of her? Pinter doesn't deal with cosy certainties and, like Baudelaire's "Héautontimorouménos" (the self-tormenter) she is, like all of us, both victim and butcher. We leave the theatre with an awkward feeling, lost in the moral haze that director Matthew Dunster so wonderfully represents with a real fog surrounding both the stage and the stalls as we enter the auditorium. The actors are all superb, particularly Jared Harris as a magnificently stentoreous Max, Joe Cole as the sinister but sexy Lenny, and Lisa Diveney as minx turned circus ringmaster Ruth. The ambiguities of our human nature presented by Pinter with such subtle brutality made me think that is the essence of what makes any work of art great, its true social role and what makes it last in time: forcing us to face what we'd rather not face. i thought of The Homecoming as a kind of development of themes touched on by Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but unlike Maggie -so unforgettably played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1958 film version- Ruth's ultimate conformity is not a surrender, but a takeover. Harold Pinter was a North London Jew, and the victim-turned-butcher theme made me think of Israel's harsh dealings with the Palestinian population and its Arab neighbours, arguably the most burning case of moral dubiousness we face as humankind.

£12 ticket available on noticeboard for Thursday 25/1 7.30. DM if interested.

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