THE HOMECOMING. Royal Exchange to 2 March.
Manchester
THE HOMECOMING
by Harold Pinter
Royal Exchange Theatre To 2 March 2002
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS 0161 833 9833
Review Timothy Ramsden 2 February
Pinter's sexual power-play brought to life with force and subtlety.It seems strange to talk of modern Pinter acting, but actors have lost their fear of the pause. The Homecoming (1965) is his last major play with a working-class setting. These East End lads only go up West on business – driving the rich or providing sex through their girls on the game. Six affluent years later, in Old Times, Pinter had moved territory, setting up his rooms among the leisured and affluent.
In 1965 Pinter pauses were already famous. Theatre audiences weren't so familiar with his characters, for whom the alternatives in handling a situation were aggression or sentimentality. Their inconsequentialities were less deliberate menace than a search to articulate feelings.
Menace attached to Pinter through middle-class audience reactions but wasn't the real point; power was. And this play gave power a dangerous sexual edge. Greg Hersov's fine production catches this as the five males reassemble after the interval and each light up a cigar. As five smoke columns spiral to the roof, the self-satisfied bond beneath their family tensions is clear.
Only Teddy has risen to the ranks of the articulate, but his philosophical argot is useless against his family; as his wife sides with the others Michael Higgs is left flailing his superior vocabulary, pointless as a straw truncheon in a punch-up.
Pete Postlethwaite's Max does plenty of flailing. His diminishing weapons are an alleged fearsome reputation and verbal aggression to suit his mood; the cigars Sam brings home are excellent or awful according to Max's attitude of the moment to Sam. Postlethwaite flails with his walking-stick too, a man reduced physically in power, if not in mental rage, by his years. For him, pauses are truces, used for re-arming.
The central contest is between the characters who understand the power of silence and letting others speak first. Paul Hilton's Lenny is a sleek, smiling, calculating force, soft-spoken but hard-core. He meets a match in Simone Lahbib's Ruth. Both deserve audience attention when they're not speaking. They are central to the tussle, but all six performers are excellent in a production that fits on the Exchange's stage like a handmade glove.
Lenny: Paul Hilton
Max: Pete Postlethwaite
Sam: Eamon Boland
Joey: James Hillier
Teddy: Michael Higgs
Ruth: Simone Lahbib
Director: Greg Hersov
Designer: Laurie Dennett
Lighting: Bruno Poet
Sound: Steve Brown
Dialect: Tim Charrington
Fights: Renny Krupinski
2002-02-05 09:06:23