Call a play a “modern classic” and you give it a veneer of respectability. But, although the term is widely applied to Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, I suspect it has lost none of its power to provoke and disturb. The proof will come when Jamie Glover’s revival of Pinter’s 1965 play, now with a cast headed by Keith Allen, Mathew Horne and Shanaya Rafaat, opens at the Theatre Royal Bath before going on a national tour.
So what is it about The Homecoming that upsets people? When I wrote a biography of Pinter in 1996, I discovered that the play was triggered by the experience of one of Pinter’s oldest Jewish friends who went to live in Canada and for 10 years never told his Hackney dad that he had married a Gentile girl and had a family of his own. But Pinter always denied that The Homecoming was either a specifically Jewish play or a transcription of reality. What the play shows is Teddy, now an academic in the US, returning to his north London roots to introduce his wife, Ruth, to his father, his uncle and his two brothers.
The action hinges on the choice confronting Ruth: whether to go back to America with Teddy or to settle in London with her rumbustious in-laws. You might ask where the offence is in that: ever since Ibsen’s A Doll’s House wives have been turning their backs on husbands and children in a bid for independence. The difference in The Homecoming – as most spectators will know – is that Ruth will not only be expected to minister to her new family but will apparently be set up in business by Lenny, her pimping brother-in-law.
In 1965 many people were shocked by Pinter’s refusal to offer any moral condemnation of this animalistic family. In today’s world – where the #MeToo movement has led to heightened awareness of female exploitation – I suspect The Homecoming will once again trigger fierce debate. Even those who accept that Ruth escapes a sterile marriage and acquires new agency at the play’s conclusion argue that she does so at humiliating cost.
But reading the play again, I was struck by a blindingly obvious fact: that Ruth is the only realist in a house of male fantasists. Max, the foul-tongued patriarch, talks palpable nonsense about being a racetrack wizard and consultant to a group of continental butchers. Lenny, the seemingly sophisticated pimp, is reduced to a quivering wreck by his first encounter with Ruth where she achieves dominance through a glass of water. Joey, the would-be professional boxer, has, as his father admits with rare honesty, only one problem: “You don’t know how to defend yourself and you don’t know how to attack.”
The one production I’ve seen that ruthlessly exposed this house of dreams was directed by the late Luc Bondy in Paris 10 years ago. Bruno Ganz’s Max was a vain Mittyesque bigmouth, Micha Lescot’s Lenny a self-abusing neurotic and even uncle Sam, the supposedly top-class chauffeur, a lumbering figure in a bad hairpiece. The idea that Emmanuelle Seigner’s poised and steely Ruth would ever become a slave to these inadequates was laughable.
That is not, of course, the only way to play The Homecoming but I am struck by how often Pinter shows his male characters living in a world of illusion. It is certainly true of The Caretaker, where the itinerant Davies, the manipulative Mick and the ineffectual Aston are all sustained by pipe-dreams. And in his final play, Celebration, the vulgarly rich male diners inhabit a world of their own creation. Pinter had as sharp an ear as anyone – including David Mamet – for the language of male pretence and the way aggressive talk often conceals private insecurity. It’s worth recalling that when The Homecoming reopens the debate, as it surely will, about whether Ruth is a sexual victim or a vanquisher of toxic masculinity.
The Homecoming is at Theatre Royal Bath, 30 March-9 April, and tours until 21 May.